The aim of this book is to assess the relationships between conventional plant breeding and genetic engineering and to show how new techniques of cell and molecular biology will provide new views for genetic crop improvement.
Six fields have been identified as relevant for applying these new techniques; each of them is treated in a chapter of this volume. The first one (85 pp) is devoted to nitrogen fixation. As in each of the six sections (except the last one), 3 papers are found in this first chapter, each one being devoted to a different level of plant organization: whole plant, cellular and molecular. The second section (about 100pp) deals with photosynthesis with a first paper entitled "Breeding for improved CO2 fixation", a second one devoted to "Aspects of photosynthetic plant tissue cultures" and a third one dealing with "The chloroplast nuclear photosynthesis genes".
The three next sections are respectively entitled: seed quality, stress tolerance and disease resistance, secondary products being the subject of the sixth and last section. Each contribution is followed by a list of references given with full titles but not in alphabetical order. Another shortcoming is the abscence of any subject index and even a list of contributors.
The book as the other ones of this series (entitled Advances in Agricultural Biotechnology) has been produced by photo-offset of the manuscripts given by the authors and in spite of the weaknesses of this system, the result obtained here is rather good. I will recommend this volume to everybody interested in crop improvement for giving him new perspectives.