Genomic characterization supporting the development of new food and crop options from the Australian flora

Abstract

Plant biodiversity is a key resource underpinning efforts to satisfy the food needs of growing human populations while coping with climate change. Crop wild relatives provide options for diversification and...

A review of the de novo domestication and cultivation of edible Australian native plants as food crops

“…However, crop domestication initially involved, on average, the modification of only three major traits, which were controlled primarily by single genes (Meyer et al, 2012;Østerberg et al, 2017;Stetter et al, 2017). So, the use of molecular breeding techniques that target limited numbers of single gene traits to 'mimic' domestication events could increase the speed and efficiency of new crop development from Australian flora (Smýkal et al, 2018;Gasparini et al, 2021;Luo et al, 2022;Bartlett et al, 2023;Henry, 2023). Such approaches come with risks, though, including that a focus on single genes may over-simplify domestication or neglect the importance of agronomy and genotype-by-environment interactions in the crop phenotype (Passioura, 2020;Van Tassel et al, 2020;Bartlett et al, 2023), and should therefore be used in conjunction with more traditional approaches.…”

“…(soybean) (Hwang et al, 2019). As well as providing a genetic resource for associated breeding programmes of domestic crops (Henry, 2023), such taxa are likely to share some traits that favoured their relatives' domestication, increasing their potential for de novo domestication. This suggests that edible Australian flora has good potential for producing new crops.…”