Harnessing Crop Wild Diversity for Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

Warming and drought are reducing global crop production with a potential to substantially worsen global malnutrition. As with the green revolution in the last century, plant genetics may offer concrete opportunities to increase yield and crop adaptability. However, the rate at which the threat is happening requires powering new strategies in order to meet the global food demand. In this review, we highlight major recent ‘big data’ developments from both empirical and theoretical genomics that may speed up the identification, conservation, and breeding of exotic and elite crop varieties with the potential to feed humans. We first emphasize the major bottlenecks to capture and utilize novel sources of variation in abiotic stress (i.e., heat and drought) tolerance. We argue that adaptation of crop wild relatives to dry environments could be informative on how plant phenotypes may react to a drier climate because natural selection has already tested more options than humans ever will. Because isolated pockets of cryptic diversity may still persist in remote semi-arid regions, we encourage new habitat-based population-guided collections for genebanks. We continue discussing how to systematically study abiotic stress tolerance in these crop collections of wild and landraces using geo-referencing and extensive environmental data. By uncovering the genes that underlie the tolerance adaptive trait, natural variation has the potential to be introgressed into elite cultivars. However, unlocking adaptive genetic variation hidden in related wild species and early landraces remains a major challenge for complex traits that, as abiotic stress tolerance, are polygenic (i.e., regulated by many low-effect genes). Therefore, we finish prospecting modern analytical approaches that will serve to overcome this issue. Concretely, genomic prediction, machine learning, and multi-trait gene editing, all offer innovative alternatives to speed up more accurate pre- and breeding efforts toward the increase in crop adaptability and yield, while matching future global food demands in the face of increased heat and drought. In order for these ‘big data’ approaches to succeed, we advocate for a trans-disciplinary approach with open-source data and long-term funding. The recent developments and perspectives discussed throughout this review ultimately aim to contribute to increased crop adaptability and yield in the face of heat waves and drought events.

Phylogenomic and Microsynteny Analysis Provides Evidence of Genome Arrangements of High-Affinity Nitrate Transporter Gene Families of Plants

“…The data generated in this work can be incorporated into genomic prediction and machine learning studies. Therefore, it can help understand the bases of the genetic adaptations of species in response to climate change and environmental stress [ 102 , 106 , 107 , 108 ] since the absorption of N can act as a factor that enhances or limits these adaptive responses [ 78 , 109 ].…”

Multi-Environment Yield Components in Advanced Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) × Tepary Bean (P. acutifolius A. Gray) Interspecific Lines for Heat and Drought Tolerance

“…Second, more explicit additive models such as GWAS mapping [60], and polygenetic genomic prediction (GP) will respectively enlighten the genomic architecture of drought and heat tolerance in Phaseolus beans, while improving predictions of the genomic estimated breeding values (GEBVs) in yet to be established congruity-backcross hybrid seedlings (i.e., genomic-assisted backcrossing-GABC) [60]. Given the complex nature of the heat and drought tolerances, it is foreseen that the GP and GABC approaches would outperform GWAS-type modeling [61], without meaning that the latter will be incapable to capture variants with moderate effects segregating at medium frequencies, still useful to boost more traditional and scalable marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC) initiatives [62]. Merging these approaches will eventually insight into molecular evolution and pre-breeding under heat and drought stresses [12], both at the yield and ecophysiological levels [63].…”

Integrative Pre-Breeding for Biotic Resistance in Forest Trees

“…Sustainable forestry development must also better integrate disciplines that adjust to the particularities of each locality. In this way, it may be achievable to select elite genotypes, and identify genetically improved clones with narrow pre-adaptations [45] that can overcome the biotic adversities they face [46]. Since the XIX century, the need to harness alternatives for the conservation [47] of global tree diversity has arisen, recognizing the management of tropical forests as a key element [14].…”