Importance of Landraces in Cereal Breeding for Stress Tolerance

Abstract

The renewed focus on cereal landraces is a response to some negative consequences of modern agriculture and conventional breeding which led to a reduction of genetic diversity. Cereal landraces are still cultivated on marginal lands due to their adaptability to unfavourable conditions, constituting an important source of genetic diversity usable in modern plant breeding to improve the adaptation to abiotic or biotic stresses, yield performance and quality traits in limiting environments. Traditional agricultural production systems have played an important role in the evolution and conservation of wide variability in gene pools within species. Today, on-farm and ex situ conservation in gene bank collections, together with data sharing among researchers and breeders, will greatly benefit cereal improvement. Many efforts are usually made to collect, organize and phenotypically and genotypically analyse cereal landrace collections, which also utilize genomic approaches. Their use in breeding programs based on genomic selection, and the discovery of beneficial untapped QTL/genes/alleles which could be introgressed into modern varieties by MAS, pyramiding or biotechnological tools, increase the potential for their better deployment and exploitation in breeding for a more sustainable agricultural production, particularly enhancing adaptation and productivity in stress-prone environments to cope with current climate changes.

Phenotyping Mediterranean Durum Wheat Landraces for Resistance to Zymoseptoria tritici in Tunisia

“…Breeding for disease resistance has been one of the important traits in breeding programs worldwide; thus, finding reliable sources of adult-plant resistance is of great importance to breeders. Durum wheat landraces represent important sources to resistance to diseases [ 7 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ] and to abiotic stresses such as drought and salinity [ 14 ], while providing useful genes for other traits including quality [ 8 , 48 ].…”

“…However, it is well known to breeders that useful genes are often linked to some undesirable traits that lead to longer cycles of selection to remove them. Landraces have been extensively characterized in terms of genetic diversity and population structure [ 3 , 10 ], and have great potential for the identification of novel sources of resistance to biotic and/or abiotic stresses [ 3 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Climate change does not only affect abiotic stresses such as drought, heat and cold, but also affects various fungal pathogens (rusts, leaf and head blights) [ 15 ] that have the potential to rapidly adapt to climate change; hence, it presents great limiting factors for wheat production in the Mediterranean region, which hosts some of the most damaging and virulent races of diseases and pests [ 16 ].…”

The Sustainable Use of Natural Resources in Rural Areas of Ukraine: The Governance Challenge

“…They are selected and managed by local people in the local environment, and they possess a high-level intra diversity. Therefore, they are heterogenous, polymorphic in nature (Joshi, 2017;Marone et al, 2021;Shiva, Ramprasad and Bhar, 1994). They are well adapted to the growing areas, and they produce high nutrition yield (Joshi et al, 2020c) and health index yield.…”

“…Indigenous seeds are used mainly for production and in research studies. This is the basis of developing modern high-yielding varieties (Dwivedi et al, 2016;Marone et al, 2021). Green revolution in agriculture is because of their role in contributing specific genes.…”

State of Crop Landraces in Arcadia (Greece) and In-Situ Conservation Potential

“…According to Bennett [10], wheat landraces in Greece have reduced from 80% to less than 10% during a 30-year period from 1930s to 1960s, while 97% of Greece's durum wheat landraces have been replaced by improved cultivars [11]. Landraces as genetically diverse populations can adapt to environmental and climatic changes and their wealthy gene pool can contribute to plant breeding programs [12,13]. Furthermore, they form a diverse source of food for humans and feed for animals [14].…”