Breeding’s old meaning: verb- (of animals) mate and then produce offspring; noun - a stock of animals or plants within a species having a distinctive appearance and typically having been developed by deliberate selection.

Meet the new meaning.

US regulators grapple with oversight of New Breeding Techniques (NBTs)

New breeding techniques (NBTs) are new methods of genetic engineering that give scientists the ability to more precisely genetically modify crops and animals. Using NBTs, researchers can enhance or silence or insert or remove desired traits. Scientists usually move genes from within species (although there are a few transgenic examples of NBTs), bypassing a common argument against first generation genetic engineering (GMOs), which required crossing the “species barrier” through the transfer of genes from bacteria and other plant species. NBTs also allow researchers to more precisely and quickly insert desired traits from within species than traditional breeding, which is one reason why regulators look at them as a faster version of conventional breeding techniques. Due to these differences with GMOs, plants bred with these techniques have so far faced lower regulatory hurdles than “transgenic” products, although the regulatory landscape is unsettled.

NBTs occasionally use transgenics and most new products can be developed in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional or transgenic breeding. There is no finite set of NBTs and future techniques may be put under the same umbrella term. There are currently seven broad, scientific categories of NBTs. Most popular in agricultural biotechnology are gene editing—CRISPR systems and TALENs—and other NBTs, including RNA interference (RNAi) and epigenetic techniques and sprays. Read more.