A group of farmers artificially select and breed a high yield crop. Over a period of 60 years, they see a continuously increasing response to selection with over a 3x increase in yield. What will determine how sustainable this high of a response to selection is ? Will the artificial selection cause the crop to keep increasing in yield forever ?
The sustainability of the high response to selection can be determined by estimating the cumulative genetic variance in the population of the plants.This is dependent on the use of resources by the crops.
Selection respnse is the product of the delection differential and heritability.
Artificial selection is employed to increase the crop yields and in a continous process there are chances of bottleneck effects and accumulation of undesirable mutations .Therefore the crop yield may be limited on continous duration.
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