The role of genetics in mainstreaming the production of new and orphan crops to diversify food systems and support human nutrition

Abstract

Summary Especially in low‐income nations, new and orphan crops provide important opportunities to improve diet quality and the sustainability of food production, being rich in nutrients, capable of fitting into multiple niches in production systems, and relatively adapted to low‐input conditions. The evolving space for these crops in production systems presents particular genetic improvement requirements that extensive gene pools are able to accommodate. Particular needs for genetic development identified in part with plant breeders relate to three areas of fundamental importance for addressing food production and human demographic trends and associated challenges, namely: facilitating integration into production systems; improving the processability of crop products; and reducing farm labour requirements. Here, we relate diverse involved target genes and crop development techniques. These techniques include transgressive methods that involve defining exemplar crop models for effective new and orphan crop improvement pathways. Research on new and orphan crops not only supports the genetic improvement of these crops, but they serve as important models for understanding crop evolutionary processes more broadly, guiding further major crop evolution. The bridging position of orphan crops between new and major crops provides unique opportunities for investigating genetic approaches for de novo domestications and major crop ‘rewildings’.

Diversity and Domestication Status of Spider Plant (Gynandropsis gynandra, L.) amongst Sociolinguistic Groups of Northern Namibia

“…Domestication and scaling-up the adoption of indigenous vegetable species with high nutraceutical potential is one of the promising strategies that countries, that want to generate and sustain broad-based wealth, need to embrace. Understanding of domestication syndrome is considered as the starting point for the developing new and orphan crops [27]. The finding of this study suggested that spider plant was at early stages of domestication (level 2) and this was consistent with the finding of other researchers [28] who found that spider plant at level two of domestication in Gbede village in Benin.…”

Fonio millet genome unlocks African orphan crop diversity for agriculture in a changing climate

“…Although plant breeding has adapted the major cereal crops to a wide range of climates and cultivation practices, there is limited genetic diversity within these few plant species for cultivation in the most extreme environments. On the other hand, crop wild relatives and orphan crops are often adapted to extreme environments and their utility to unlock marginal lands for agriculture has recently regained interest 2,6,[11][12][13][14] . Current technological advances in genomics and genome editing provide an opportunity to rapidly domesticate wild relatives and to improve orphan crops 15,16 .…”

Diversity and conservation of traditional African vegetables: Priorities for action

“…Broadly, the term “wild” is applied when a species is predominantly harvested from natural stands; “semi‐domesticated” when a species is both widely harvested from natural stands and is in significant “cultivation”; and “domesticated” when a species is principally cultivated. These are loose definitions because “domesticated” has a specific biological meaning distinct from to be “cultivated,” but our applied terms suffice for the current analysis (for further discussion, see Dawson, Powell, et al., 2019).…”