"The book...is, in fact, a short text on the many practical problems...associated with translating the explosion in basic biotechnological research into the next Green Revolution," explains Economic Botany. The book is "a concise and accurate narrative, that also manages to be interesting and personal...a splendid little book." Biotechnology states, "Because of the clarity with which it is written, this thin volume makes a major contribution to improving public understanding of genetic engineering's potential for enlarging the world's food supply...and can be profitably read by practically anyone interested in application of molecular biology to improvement of productivity in agriculture."

Assists policymakers in evaluating the appropriate scientific methods for detecting unintended changes in food and assessing the potential for adverse health effects from genetically modified products. In this book, the committee recommended that greater scrutiny should be given to foods containing new compounds or unusual amounts of naturally occurring substances, regardless of the method used to create them. The book offers a framework to guide federal agencies in selecting the route of safety assessment. It identifies and recommends several pre- and post-market approaches to guide the assessment of unintended compositional changes that could result from genetically modified foods and research avenues to fill the knowledge gaps.

" . . . . . . Nature has something more in view than that its own proper males should fecundate each blossom. " Andrew Knight Philosophical Transactions, 1799 Sterility implicating the male sex solely presents a paradoxical situation in which universality and uniqueness are harmoniously blended. It maintains a built-in outbreeding system but is not an isolating mechanism, as male steriles, the "self-emasculated" plants, outcross with their male fertile sibs normally. Both genes (nuclear and cytoplasmic) and environment, individually as well as conjointly, induce male sterility, the former being genetic and the latter nongenetic. Genetic male sterility is controlled either exclusively by nuclear genes (ms) or by the complementary action of nuclear (lr) and cytoplasmic (c) genes. The former is termed genic and the latter gene-cytoplasmic male sterility. Whereas genic male sterility exhibits Mendelian inheritance, gene-cytoplasmic male sterility is non-Mendelian, with specific transmissibility of the maternal cytoplasm type. Genetic male sterility is documented in 617 species and species crosses com prising 320 species, 162 genera and 43 families. Of these, genic male sterility occurs in 216 species and 17 species crosses and gene-cytoplasmic male sterility in 16 species and 271 species crosses. The Predominance of species exhibiting genic male sterility and of species crosses exhibiting gene-cytoplasmic male sterility is due to the fact that for the male sterility expression in the former, mutation of nuclear genes is required, but in the latter, mutations of both nuclear and cytoplasmic genes are necessary.

Although only about 3 years have passed since the preparation of the original manuscript of this book for the Russian edition, the number of successful experiments on somatic hybridization of higher plants has doubled. Although the main inferences of the first edition still remain in force, most of them have received conclusive experimental support and, moreover, some new con clusions have been drawn. It can be expected that these inferences and conclusions will constitute a more or less durable foundation for somatic cell genetics of higher plants. We thus hope this book will also remain useful over the next years, in spite of the rapid progress of experiments and the increase in the number of scientific reports in this field. Though it might appear strange to an uninvolved observer, the principal progress in hybridization of somatic cells of higher plants has been due to plant physiologists (who entered the field by elaborating methods and techniques for plant cell and, later, for isolated protoplast culture) rather than plant geneticists. However, further qualitative improvement in this field is inconceivable without the instillation of genetic ideology and the strict logic of genetic experiments. The main purpose ofthis book is the attempt to organize the available experimental data in terms and cate gories of genetic analysis. For this reason, this book lays no claim on being a comprehensive treatise on somatic hybridization.

This book reviews the latest advances in multiple fields of plant biotechnology and the opportunities that plant genetics, genomics and molecular biology have offered for agriculture improvement. Advanced technologies can dramatically enhance our capacity in understanding the molecular basis of traits and utilizing the available resources for accelerated development of high yielding, nutritious, input-use efficient and climate-smart crop varieties. In this book, readers will discover the significant advances in plant genetics, structural and functional genomics, trait and gene discovery, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, nanotechnology and analytical & decision support tools in breeding. This book appeals to researchers, academics and other stakeholders of global agriculture.