Crop Diversity: An Unexploited Treasure Trove for Food Security

Massawe, Festo; Mayes, Sean; Cheng, Acga

doi:10.1016/j.tplants.2016.02.006

Cited by 212 publications

(158 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Current agricultural systems overwhelmingly rely on a small number of highly productive crops. A mere 20 plant species are used to fulfil 90% of the world's calorie requirements, with just three of these – rice, maize and wheat – supplying approximately 60% of the total (Massawe et al ., ; Buchanan‐Wollaston et al ., ). Domestication of these food crops from wild species began more than 10 000 years ago, over the course of which the performance and genetic architecture of the original progenitors were radically transformed (Tanksley and McCouch, ; McCouch, ).…”

Section: Harnessing the Genetic Diversity Of Exotic Germplasmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Salt stress under the scalpel – dissecting the genetics of salt tolerance

et al. 2019

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Summary Salt stress limits the productivity of crops grown under saline conditions, leading to substantial losses of yield in saline soils and under brackish and saline irrigation. Salt tolerant crops could alleviate these losses while both increasing irrigation opportunities and reducing agricultural demands on dwindling freshwater resources. However, despite significant efforts, progress towards this goal has been limited, largely because of the genetic complexity of salt tolerance for agronomically important yield‐related traits. Consequently, the focus is shifting to the study of traits that contribute to overall tolerance, thus breaking down salt tolerance into components that are more genetically tractable. Greater consideration of the plasticity of salt tolerance mechanisms throughout development and across environmental conditions furthers this dissection. The demand for more sophisticated and comprehensive methodologies is being met by parallel advances in high‐throughput phenotyping and sequencing technologies that are enabling the multivariate characterisation of vast germplasm resources. Alongside steady improvements in statistical genetics models, forward genetics approaches for elucidating salt tolerance mechanisms are gaining momentum. Subsequent quantitative trait locus and gene validation has also become more accessible, most recently through advanced techniques in molecular biology and genomic analysis, facilitating the translation of findings to the field. Besides fuelling the improvement of established crop species, this progress also facilitates the domestication of naturally salt tolerant orphan crops. Taken together, these advances herald a promising era of discovery for research into the genetics of salt tolerance in plants.

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Section: Harnessing the Genetic Diversity Of Exotic Germplasmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Salt stress under the scalpel – dissecting the genetics of salt tolerance

et al. 2019

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“…New paradigms are needed to increase sustainability in agricultural systems, including methods to explore the genetic potential of the vast but woefully underutilized germplasm resources available for most crop species. Crucial to this effort are the recent advent of low cost, high throughput DNA sequencing technologies and corresponding advances in computational genomics 2 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genomic and phenotypic analysis of Vavilov’s historic landraces reveals the impact of environment and genomic islands of agronomic traits

Plekhanova

Vishnyakova

Bulyntsev

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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The Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR), in St. Petersburg, Russia, houses a unique genebank, with historical collections of landraces. When they were collected, the geographical distribution and genetic diversity of most crops closely reflected their historical patterns of cultivation established over the preceding millennia. We employed a combination of genomics, computational biology and phenotyping to characterize VIR’s 147 chickpea accessions from Turkey and Ethiopia, representing chickpea’s center of origin and a major location of secondary diversity. Genotyping by sequencing identified 14,059 segregating polymorphisms and genome-wide association studies revealed 28 GWAS hits in potential candidate genes likely to affect traits of agricultural importance. The proportion of polymorphisms shared among accessions is a strong predictor of phenotypic resemblance, and of environmental similarity between historical sampling sites. We found that 20 out of 28 polymorphisms, associated with multiple traits, including days to maturity, plant phenology, and yield-related traits such as pod number, localized to chromosome 4. We hypothesize that selection and introgression via inadvertent hybridization between more and less advanced morphotypes might have resulted in agricultural improvement genes being aggregated to genomic ‘agro islands’, and in genotype-to-phenotype relationships resembling widespread pleiotropy.

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“…(Huynh et al 2013), is an important on-going component of their crop improvement. The significance of 'underutilized' crop species (also known as 'minor', 'orphan' or 'neglected') for global food security is gradually gaining the attention of the international research community and food security policy organizations (Jaenicke and Höschle-Zeledon 2006;Massawe et al 2016). Underutilized species exist mostly as landraces and wild collections due to decades of neglect by the scientific community (Williams and Haq 2002;Massawe et al 2005;).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%