Rewilding crops for climate resilience: economic analysis and de novo domestication strategies

Abstract

To match predicted population growth, annual food production should be doubled by 2050. This is not achievable by the current agronomical and breeding practices, due to impact of climate changes and associated abiotic stresses on agricultural production systems. Here, we analyze an impact of global climate trends on crop productivity and show that the overall loss in the crop production from climate-driven abiotic stresses may exceed US$ 170Bln p.a. and represents a major threat to global food security. We also show that abiotic stress tolerance has been present in wild progenitors of modern crops but was lost during their domestication. We argue for a major shift in our paradigm of crop breeding, focusing on the climate resilience, and call for a broader use of wild relatives as a major tool in this process. We argue that, while molecular tools are currently in place to harness a potential of climate-resilient genes present in wild relatives, a complex polygenic nature of tolerance traits remains a major bottleneck in this process. Future research efforts should be focused not only on finding appropriate wild relatives but also on development efficient cell-based high throughput phenotyping platforms allowing to assess in planta operation of key genes.

Next-Generation Breeding Strategies for Climate-Ready Crops

“…De novo domestication is another important breeding pipeline benefited by the powerful technology of CRISPR/Cas. De novo domestication can be used to exploit the GD and has a great potential to introduce desriable traits in CWRs (Razzaq et al, 2021 ). De novo domestication of four wild cultivars of tomato was performed by mutating the four genes SlWUS, SlCLV3, SP5G , and SP through CRISPR/Cas9-mediated multiplex genome editing to develop improved tomato fruits (Li et al, 2018b ).…”

De-novo Domestication for Improving Salt Tolerance in Crops

“…Each step of salt inducive mechanism plays a vital role in providing the salinity tolerance and survival to the plant. and climate resilience (Razzaq et al, 2021b). Genomes of important crop species have been sequenced and some are in the pipeline that also includes underutilized crops, CWRs halophytes, and models plants (Jackson et al, 2011;Kang et al, 2016).…”

“…Hence, instead of incorporating domesticated genes from CRWs into cultivated species, as in conventional approaches, de novo domestication is done to mimic the natural process of breeding (Fernie and Yan, 2019 ). De-novo domestication strategy may offer quick and accurate modifications of CWRs into cultivated crops, while preserving most of the beneficial alleles controlling stress resilience, important agronomic and nutritional traits, disappeared during breeding (Gasparini et al, 2021 ; Razzaq et al, 2021b ).…”

“…The idea of de novo domestication is to explore and examine the stress-responsive genes by mutating them that resulted in the designing of new crop varieties having better adaptation and climate resilience (Razzaq et al, 2021b ). Genomes of important crop species have been sequenced and some are in the pipeline that also includes underutilized crops, CWRs halophytes, and models plants (Jackson et al, 2011 ; Kang et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Retrieving the stress-responsive genes that have been lost during the domestication process is crucial for crop improvement. Identification and introduction of these genes from wild to domesticated crops can be vital for climate resilience (Mammadov et al, 2018 ; Razzaq et al, 2021b ).…”