User:Foonarres/sandbox

=Genetic vulnerability=

In plant breeding, a population of plants is considered genetically vulnerable if there is little genetic diversity within the population, and this lack of diversity makes the population as a whole particularly vulnerable to disease, pests, or other factors. The problem of genetic vulnerability often arises with modern crop varieties, which are uniform by design.

An example of the consequences of genetic vulnerability occured in 1970 when corn blight struck the US corn belt, destroying 15% of the harvest. A particular plant cell characteristic known as Texas male sterile cytoplasm conferred vulnerability to the blight - a subsequent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that 90% of American maize plants carried this trait.