Plant Sciences
Abstract
Plant sciences means to reflect the scientific study of plants, their environment, and how to use them. Preparing an overview of plant sciences during a pandemic necessarily changes one's perspective of the field, past and present. Growing plants from tissues is a horticultural method that uses vegetative cuttings, scions, or budwood to generate clonal plants. Progress in the plant sciences is predicated on tools and techniques. The significant advances have included commercially available reagents for molecular biology, standardized techniques, specialized equipment, and reagents developed from plant pathogens as tools to study plants. The singular event of plant genetic engineering, a biotechnology, frames and informs the plant sciences for the last half-century. Previous to the development of genetic engineering technologies, the plant sciences were primarily predicated on standard Mendelian techniques and classical botany (and its sister areas of experimentation, such as plant breeding, agronomy, plant pathology, entomology, forestry, and soil sciences).