De-novo Domestication for Improving Salt Tolerance in Crops

Abstract

Global agriculture production is under serious threat from rapidly increasing population and adverse climate changes. Food security is currently a huge challenge to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Crop domestication through conventional approaches is not good enough to meet the food demands and unable to fast-track the crop yields. Also, intensive breeding and rigorous selection of superior traits causes genetic erosion and eliminates stress-responsive genes, which makes crops more prone to abiotic stresses. Salt stress is one of the most prevailing abiotic stresses that poses severe damages to crop yield around the globe. Recent innovations in state-of-the-art genomics and transcriptomics technologies have paved the way to develop salinity tolerant crops. De novo domestication is one of the promising strategies to produce superior new crop genotypes through exploiting the genetic diversity of crop wild relatives (CWRs). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies open new avenues to identifying the unique salt-tolerant genes from the CWRs. It has also led to the assembly of highly annotated crop pan-genomes to snapshot the full landscape of genetic diversity and recapture the huge gene repertoire of a species. The identification of novel genes alongside the emergence of cutting-edge genome editing tools for targeted manipulation renders de novo domestication a way forward for developing salt-tolerance crops. However, some risk associated with gene-edited crops causes hurdles for its adoption worldwide. Halophytes-led breeding for salinity tolerance provides an alternative strategy to identify extremely salt tolerant varieties that can be used to develop new crops to mitigate salinity stress.

Conventional and new-breeding technologies for improving disease resistance in lentil (Lens culinaris Medik)

“…New breeding technologies including genomics assisted breeding (GAB), speed breeding and gene editing, and next-generation breeding targets developing climate-resilient varieties using all sorts of strongly associated marker identification, phenotyping based on machine learning and artificial intelligence (Razzaq et al, 2021). Genomic data along with added information from pan genomes, modification in CRISPR technology, innovation in genome editing and advanced form of base editing were considered for food security in this era of new breeding technologies (Fasoula et al, 2020).…”

Climate change challenges, plant science solutions

“…Despite several wild relatives having remarkable tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, successful introgression of these traits into elite backgrounds has been difficult due to linkage drag ( Nevo and Chen, 2010 ) and the complexity of most traits. De novo domestication, the incorporation of domesticated genes into the nondomesticated species to develop new crops ( Razzaq et al, 2021 ), presents a novel opportunity for immediate utilization of the novel resilience alleles in CWRs. The availability of vast genomic and phenomic resources allow for machine learning ( Niazian and Niedbała, 2020 ) and more precise genome editing ( Hua et al, 2019 ).…”

Accelerated Domestication of New Crops: Yield is Key

“…2021 ). Salinization of land is also dramatically limiting yields in many regions, for which direct domestication of salt-tolerant species has the potential to bring these degraded lands back into production ( Razzaq et al. 2021 ).…”