Improving crop yield potential: Underlying biological processes and future prospects

Abstract

The growing world population and global increases in the standard of living both result in an increasing demand for food, feed and other plant-derived products. In the coming years, plant-based research will be among the major drivers ensuring food security and the expansion of the bio-based economy. Crop productivity is determined by several factors, including the available physical and agricultural resources, crop management, and the resource use efficiency, quality and intrinsic yield potential of the chosen crop. This review focuses on intrinsic yield potential, since understanding its determinants and their biological basis will allow to maximize the plant's potential in food and energy production. Yield potential is determined by a variety of complex traits that integrate strictly regulated processes and their underlying gene regulatory networks. Due to this inherent complexity, numerous potential targets have been identified that could be exploited to increase crop yield. These encompass diverse metabolic and physical processes at the cellular, organ and canopy level. We present an overview of some of the distinct biological processes considered to be crucial for yield determination that could further be exploited to improve future crop productivity.

CropBooster‐P: Towards a roadmap for plant research to future‐proof crops in Europe

“…Finally, the panel of experts belonging to participant institutions from the CropBooster-P consortium, ensuring a broad representation of knowledge about species, research fields, approaches and technologies, have queried the database. This already resulted in several reviews describing relevant genes, traits and technologies of interest and presenting a prospective view on breeding options that could be exploited in distinct research fields with respect to crop improvement (Burgess et al, 2022;Gojon et al, 2022;Scharff et al, 2021).…”

“…In addition, modeling approaches have demonstrated how adjusting individual traits can improve crop biomass, using photosynthesis as a case study. Based on the database, a set of traits that could be explored to sustainably improve crop yield and nutritional quality has been identified (Burgess et al, 2022;Gojon et al, 2022;Scharff et al, 2021). These are, however, only the tip of the iceberg, and the flexibility of the database allows us to further extract specific information, e.g.…”

“…To breed crops adapted to the future climate of Europe, potential approaches were identified within WP1 that may result in crops with a sustainably increased yield without compromising or even improving nutritional quality (WP1: ‘Research toolbox’) (Burgess et al, 2022; Gojon et al, 2022; Scharff et al, 2021). Crops will need to be more stress‐tolerant and more resilient to environmental constraints, ensuring a better adaption to and/or faster recovery from suboptimal growth conditions.…”

“…In this way, it is possible to identify trends and commonalities between multiple database entries, identified traits and specified technologies. With the help of the database, several key opportunities to improve crop production and quality have been identified (Baekelandt et al, 2022; Burgess et al, 2022; Gojon et al, 2022; Scharff et al, 2021), e.g., exploring the wild germplasm of crops for desirable traits, investigating alternative protein sources using non‐traditional and ancient grain species, and reducing or even eliminating anti‐nutritional factors in plants by means of biotechnological approaches.

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Future‐proofing crop production to meet the societies needs

“…The special issue includes reviews that focus on improving crops and in particular identify and evaluate those biological processes considered to have the greatest potential for increasing crop yield potential and nutritional quality, and ensuring crop resilience (Scharff et al, 2021; Gojon, et al, 2022; Burgess et al, 2022). Another article (Harbinson & Yin, 2022) highlights the importance of using modelling approaches to evaluate the potential utility of changing specific crop traits for both current and future environments.…”