Fig. 1.

Plant breeding milestones. The start of domestication and initial plant breeding dates back around 12,000 B.C. when the living style of Human-being changed from gathering and hunting to agriculture. The first-ever domesticated plant was emmer wheat. Since then, ancient domestication and selective breeding were dominant until the discovery of Mendel’s laws of genetics. The laws of genetics triggered and enhanced the crossbreeding wave. A milestone in plant breeding that plays an essential role in modern plant breeding was the invention of the totipotency of plant cells in the early 1900s by Gottlieb Haberlandt. As a result, the first in vitro tissue culture was introduced in 1960 with carrot. Plant tissue culture was the critical step for generating the first Agrobacterium-mediated transgenic tomato in 1994, known as transgenic breeding. In the meantime, mutational breeding using chemical or physical agents was also introduced in the 1930s and played an important role in generating diverse genetic materials for crop breeding. Biochemical markers further enhanced crossbreeding in marker-assisted selection (MAS) breeding. The recently emerging genome editing approaches have revolutionized plant breeding to precision levels that have never been obtained before. High oleic acid soybean, the first genome-edited crop that was released in 2019, has been opening the wave of genome-edited precision breeding in plants