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38 Plant breeders continuously work to find to techniques and strategies for crop improvement. InnovationinBreeding SINCEthe earliest days humans have strived to meet the needs of a continuously growing population and that challenge continues as the global pop- ulation is expected to grow from todays more than seven billion people to an estimated nine billion people by 2050. This puts pressure on plant breeders and the rest of agri- culture to find new ways and new varieties that will help to increase yields increase nutritional content and increase shelf-life. Through plant breeding annual yield gains of one to two per cent have been achieved in a number of crops allow- ing global food production to increase by 25 per cent between 1990 and 2000 according to the International Seed Federations ISF Smart from the Start video. Today there are 124 million people across 118 countries who are deficient in vitamin A and need crops with higher carotenoids. Floods affect an additional 106 million people every year and 2.2 billion acres are impacted by soil salinity. According to the Agricultural Outlook 2012-2021 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations actual yields for the main food crops are well below potential yields in many regions with yield gaps in many developing countries in excess of 50 per cent. Innovation Begins with a Need In working to meet these challenges scientists and plant breeders have developed precise tools to safely increase specificity and efficiency of breeding decrease develop- ment time and cost and increase genetic diversity for breed- ing programs. These new breeding tools are often referred to as New Breeding Techniques. One example of a new breeding technique is cisgenics and intragenics. Henk Schouten a plant breeder at Wageningen University in the Netherlands explains that cisgenesis is the genetic modification of a recipient plant with a natural gene from a crossable or sexually compatible plant. Such a gene includes its introns and is flanked by its native promoter and terminator in the normal sense orientation. Cisgenic plants can harbour one or more cisgenes but they do not contain any transgenes. Another technique that is similar is intragenics. Caius Rommens of J.R. Simplot Co. explains that intragenesis is a novel approach to genetic engineering that improves varieties by eliminating undesirable features and activating dormant traits. It transforms plants with native expression cassettes to fine-turn the activity andor tissue specificity of target genes. Unlike cisgenes intragenes are hybrid genes meaning they can have genetic elements from different genes and loci. By using different promoter or terminator regions expression of genes can be modified which gives the possibility for new gene recombinations by in vitro rearrangements of functional genetic elements. According to the experts neither cisgenesis nor intragenesis involve recombination between non-sexually compatible organisms and no foreign sequences are present in the final organism. These are just two examples of these new breeding tech- niques which really arent all that new theyve been around for more than a decade. Other breeding methods that are being used include site-directed nucleases null segragants and classic gene delivery systems. New more cost-effective breeding techniques fall into a gray area globally when it comes to regulation. The international seed industry unites to help educate policymakers on plant breedings newest innovations.