One of the most important tools of molecular plant breeding is genetic engineering, that increasingly gains in it's importance as it allows the emergence of plants with good agronomic properties, such as satisfactory crops with premium quality, resistance to diseases and pests and phytosanitary preparations . There are many methods that are either used independently or in combination with already existing breeding methods. Among the most used methods, which make it possible to change a particular single property or a groups of properties are biolistics, electroporation and microinjection. These methods were largely followed by the use of a »natural genetic engineering« based on the transfer of the heritable material between the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens and dicotyledons. This method was used in more than 65 % of the plant breeding cases for the regeneration of agronomically important plants that are market cultivated. In the last years however we are witnessing the development of newer methods for genome editing of plants, such as ZFN – zinc finger nucleases, TALEN – transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases, CRISPR/Cas9 – clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat, CRISPR-associated nuclease and ODM – oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis. They are categorized as the newer breeding methods that are currently being discussed intensively by various regulatory bodies in relation to whether products produced by these methods cover existing EU legislation on GMOs and whether they can be classified as already existing methods of plant breeding with mutagenesis.
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