Nutritional Value and Phytochemical Content of Crop Landraces and Traditional Varieties

Abstract

Over the years, crops have been improved through breeding, mainly to increase production and, secondly, to introduce resistance to diseases and to achieve tolerance to abiotic stresses, these two latter by resorting to Crop Wild Relatives (CWR). This has resulted, in most cases, in homogeneous and nutritionally poor commercial varieties. Landraces and traditional varieties, barely taken into account, are key resources as they retain nutrients frequently “washed away” in the commercial varieties and also harbour a great genetic variability. They could represent a shortcut when compared to CWR in breeding, saving time and resources. The consumer’s growing interest in health and food quality has caused breeders to redirect their attention toward them. This chapter provides information about the content in compounds with health benefits, such as phenolics, minerals, vitamins, etc., of landraces and traditional varieties of the most important crops, which could help to obtain healthier and more nutritious products.

Applications of Genomic Tools in Plant Breeding: Crop Biofortification

“…Some examples of these characterization works can be found in all groups of food crops, cereals [ 131 ], fruits [ 132 ], legumes [ 133 ], and vegetables [ 134 , 135 ], among others. In this sense, a considerable number of researches has compared different plant material within the same crop (for instance, landraces vs. commercial varieties) in order to identify outstanding accessions for future breeding programs aimed at enhancing the content of nutritious and beneficial compounds (reviewed in [ 3 ]). Metabolomic offers the opportunity to study the huge range of metabolites present in a sample (untargeted metabolic studies) and not only some specific compounds.…”

“…That being true, malnutrition is also present in developed countries, although in this case it is possibly due to unhealthy habits, such as extreme weight loss diets or substance abuse. It does not alleviate this situation given the fact that crop breeding has been mainly focused on increasing production, incorporating resistance to diseases, and enhancing tolerance to abiotic stresses, which has resulted in commercial varieties with low nutritional value [ 3 ].…”

“…Furthermore, the chances of achieving biofortification by conventional breeding depends on the crop itself, since the strategy relies on the genetic variability available within its gene pool, which is usually limited in commercial varieties. This could be overcome by crossing plants with landraces or with more distant wild relatives that normally harbor higher genetic variability and, sometimes, can be richer in nutrients [ 3 , 186 ]. However, in some cases, it would be impracticable to obtain biofortified crops using conventional breeding.…”

“…The first one is that the available variability only exists in plants from the same sexual compatibility group, as in conventional breeding. However, this disadvantage could be overcome, to some extent, by gene edition (in the case of intragenesis) or by making use of the higher biodiversity present in landraces [ 3 ] or wild relatives [ 186 ]. The second limitation is the need to remove the selection markers and the vector backbones, which could be both time- and labor-consuming.…”

Characterization and Enhancement of Genetic Resources for the Improvement of Nutritional and Organoleptic Quality in Solanaceae Vegetable Crops

“…On the other hand, local varieties of vegetables have been associated to the "taste of the past" (Casals et al, 2011;Causse et al, 2010). In this way, they have been reported to produce more flavourful, nutritious fruits than modern varieties in several studies (Casals et al, 2019a;Celmeli et al, 2018;Cortés-Olmos et al, 2014;Medina-Lozano and Díaz, 2021;Meza et al, 2020;Parisi et al, 2017;Sánchez et al, 2018). For instance, the Almagro eggplant landrace showed higher values for protein, vitamin C, glucose and total phenolics compared to commercial cultivars in San .…”