Turning promise into practice: Crop biotechnology for increasing genetic diversity and climate resilience

Garland, Sarah; Curry, Helen Anne

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3001716

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…Given these barriers to using CWR in breeding pipelines, in agreement with others (Bohra et al, 2022;Garland and Curry, 2022), we suggest an alternative approach: to re-domesticate progenitors of modern crop cultivars using gene editing techniques (Hanak et al, 2022). The aim would not be to produce plant ideotypes that closely resemble modern cultivars; rather, to tweak promising accessions of target CWR to meet some of our food security needs, while retaining their resilience and resistance.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives

Hanak,

Janjić,

Hay

et al. 2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Climate change threatens global food security, but the biggest impact will be in arid, low social-economic regions. To improve food security, new breeding technologies (NBTs) could be implemented for re-domestication of crop wild relatives (CWR). CWR harbor many beneficial traits, but it is difficult to incorporate these traits into conventional breeding programs. Thus, although genebanks hold significant collections of CWR, their potential has yet to be reached. Using barley as an example, we describe how using genebank collections, digital sequence information and NBTs, re-domesticated barley can be produced with improved characteristics, while retaining the resilience and adaptation of the original material. Lastly, we highlight some obstacles that need to be overcome for re-domesticates to be adopted.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives

Hanak,

Janjić,

Hay

et al. 2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…A first step in that endeavour is to identify and understand the traits that are relevant to the plant–plant interactions underlying biodiversity effects—that is, the effects that underlie the increase in yield brought by increasing levels of biodiversity (Engbersen et al, 2022; Litrico & Violle, 2015). Identification of the molecular basis of biodiversity effects, and application of gene editing technologies to diversify crops, can contribute to speed up this process (Garland & Curry, 2022; Wuest & Niklaus, 2018). At the field scale, we need to characterize trait–performance relationships in polyculture to overcome the constraints set by domestication and historical selection under monoculture.…”

Section: Research Gaps and Their Relevance To Sustainable Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Phenotypic evolution of agricultural crops

Milla

2023

Functional Ecology

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1. Food crops are a vital source of nutrition for humans and domestic animals, with an estimated 4 billion metric tons of food produced per year. Crops do not only provide yields, but their traits also play a significant role in regulating the ecosystem processes of croplands, affecting local biotas, water balance, nutrient and carbon cycling. Domestication has led to significant changes in crop traits, making it important to understand the recent evolution of crops and how they differ from wild plants.2. In this paper I review the evidence on how the ecological traits of herbaceous crops have evolved during and after domestication. Loss of seed dispersal mechanisms, increased plant and organ sizes, high rates of consumption by herbivores and fast decomposition of residues by decomposer microbes in the soil, all have evolved independently in domestication processes of different crops.3. I also point out types of traits for which we have not identified common responses to domestication, be it because domestication processes of the different crop species are disparate, or because of lack of strong evidence. Those traits include resource acquisition rates of leaves and roots, and whole-plant growth rates.Then, I discuss research gaps in the field, including how to advance knowledge for those traits that show apparently idiosyncratic responses to domestication. 4. Finally, I emphasize the importance of understanding the interactions of crops with other organisms and the environment to breed crops that deliver yield and other services required from croplands. To this end, I introduce an ideotype for sustainable agriculture, which might inspire the breeding of multipurpose herbaceous crops, in the same way than the ideotypes of the Green Revolution inspired the breeding of elite varieties to foster yields under conventional agriculture.

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“…This system also replaced many native and localized crop landraces. Realizing the genetic erosion from the fields, some organizations started working on increasing the genetic diversity in the fields and have developed different approaches that also help to conserve genetic diversity in a dynamic state [4][5][6][7]). These approaches are also good for strengthening agroecological services [8,9] as well as for diversifying the produce in households and markets.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Approaches and Advantages of Increased Crop Genetic Diversity in the Fields

et al. 2023

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Crop genetic diversity is the most important factor for a long-term sustainable production system. Breeding and production strategies for developing and growing uniform and homogenous varieties have created many problems. Such populations are static and very sensitive to unpredictable stresses. In Nepal, more than 80% of the seed system is informal, which has contributed greatly to creating and maintaining genetic diversity within the field. This paper aims to assess and present the approaches and advantages of increased crop genetic diversity in the fields, based on the experiences of implementing on-farm conservation activities carried out in Nepal for last two decades. Some of the evidence has been derived from an ongoing evolutionary plant breeding (EPB) project being implemented in Nepal. The information is supplemented with field assessments, focus group discussion, and a literature review. The major approaches to increase crop genetic diversity are evolutionary plant breeding, cultivar mixture, landrace enhancement, informal seed systems, the bulk method, diversifying the seed sources, participatory plant breeding, open pollination, etc. EPB and cultivar mixture are very simple and effective approaches to increase crop genetic diversity at field level. The involvement of farmers in these approaches helps to accelerate the population improvement, maintaining the higher degree of genetic diversity. The major advantages of increased crop genetic diversity are seed maintenance by farmers themselves, minimal risk of crop failure, resilience to unpredictable stresses, increased amount of diversified nutrition, production increment, ease of producing organically, etc. However, there are some issues and problems associated with mixtures and intra-varietal diversity; for example, not being able to harvest by machine, maturing at a different date, difficulty in maintaining seeds and registration, etc. Crop genetic diversity should be considered as a sustainable approach for a climate-resilient and self-dependent production system. The higher the genetic diversity in farming land, the more chance of receiving multiple benefits in the agriculture system.

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Turning promise into practice: Crop biotechnology for increasing genetic diversity and climate resilience

Cited by 17 publications

References 80 publications

Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives

Genome editing to re-domesticate and accelerate use of barley crop wild relatives

Phenotypic evolution of agricultural crops

Approaches and Advantages of Increased Crop Genetic Diversity in the Fields

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