Wheat genetic resources have avoided disease pandemics, improved food security, and reduced environmental footprints: A review of historical impacts and future opportunities.

The use of plant genetic resources (PGR)-wild relatives, landraces, and isolated breeding gene pools-has had substantial impacts on wheat breeding for resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, while increasing nutritional value, end-use quality, and grain yield. In the Global South, post-Green Revolution genetic yield gains are generally achieved with minimal additional inputs. As a result, production has increased, and millions of hectares of natural ecosystems have been spared.

Diamonds in the not-so-rough: Wild relative diversity hidden in crop genomes.

Crop production is becoming an increasing challenge as the global population grows and the climate changes. Modern cultivated crop species are selected for productivity under optimal growth environments and have often lost genetic variants that could allow them to adapt to diverse, and now rapidly changing, environments. These genetic variants are often present in their closest wild relatives, but so are less desirable traits.

Our shared global responsibility: Safeguarding crop diversity for future generations.

The resilience and sustainability of food systems depend on crop diversity. It is used by breeders to produce new and better varieties, and by farmers to respond to new challenges or demands and to spread risk. However, crop diversity can only be used if it has been conserved, can be identified as the solution for a given problem, and is available.

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: A Synopsis of Coordinated National Crop Wild Relative Seed Collecting Programs across Five Continents.

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change Project set out to improve the diversity, quantity, and accessibility of germplasm collections of crop wild relatives (CWR). Between 2013 and 2018, partners in 25 countries, heirs to the globetrotting legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, undertook seed collecting expeditions targeting CWR of 28 crops of global significance for agriculture. Here, we describe the implementation of the 25 national collecting programs and present the key results.

The Potential of Payment for Ecosystem Services for Crop Wild Relative Conservation.

Crop wild relatives (CWR) have proven to be very valuable in agricultural breeding programs but remain a relatively under-utilized and under-protected resource. CWR have provided resistance to pests and diseases, abiotic stress tolerance, quality improvements and yield increases with the annual contribution of these traits to agriculture estimated at USD 115 billion globally and are considered to possess many valuable traits that have not yet been explored. The use of the genetic diversity found in CWR for breeding provides much-needed resilience to modern agricultural systems and has great potential to help sustainably increase agricultural production to feed a growing world population in the face of climate change and other stresses.

Modeling of crop wild relative species identifies areas globally for in situ conservation.

The impact of climate change is causing challenges for the agricultural production and food systems. More nutritious and climate resilient crop varieties are required, but lack of available and accessible trait diversity is limiting crop improvement. Crop wild relatives (CWR) are the wild cousins of cultivated crops and a vast resource of genetic diversity for breeding new, higher yielding, climate change tolerant crop varieties, but they are under-conserved (particularly in situ), largely unavailable and therefore underutilized.

Global conservation priorities for crop wild relatives.

The wild relatives of domesticated crops possess genetic diversity useful for developing more productive, nutritious and resilient crop varieties. However, their conservation status and availability for utilization are a concern, and have not been quantified globally. Here, we model the global distribution of 1,076 taxa related to 81 crops, using occurrence information collected from biodiversity, herbarium and gene bank databases.

Global agricultural intensification during climate change: a role for genomics.

Agriculture is now facing the 'perfect storm' of climate change, increasing costs of fertilizer and rising food demands from a larger and wealthier human population. These factors point to a global food deficit unless the efficiency and resilience of crop production is increased. The intensification of agriculture has focused on improving production under optimized conditions, with significant agronomic inputs.

Application of genomics-assisted breeding for generation of climate resilient crops: progress and prospects.

Climate change affects agricultural productivity worldwide. Increased prices of food commodities are the initial indication of drastic edible yield loss, which is expected to increase further due to global warming. This situation has compelled plant scientists to develop climate change-resilient crops, which can withstand broad-spectrum stresses such as drought, heat, cold, salinity, flood, submergence and pests, thus helping to deliver increased productivity.

Patterns of domestication in the Ethiopian oil-seed crop noug (Guizotia abyssinica).

Noug (Guizotia abyssinica) is a semidomesticated oil-seed crop, which is primarily cultivated in Ethiopia. Unlike its closest crop relative, sunflower, noug has small seeds, small flowering heads, many branches, many flowering heads, and indeterminate flowering, and it shatters in the field. Here, we conducted common garden studies and microsatellite analyses of genetic variation to test whether high levels of crop-wild gene flow and/or unfavorable phenotypic correlations have hindered noug domestication.

Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.

The narrowing of diversity in crop species contributing to the world's food supplies has been considered a potential threat to food security. However, changes in this diversity have not been quantified globally. We assess trends over the past 50 y in the richness, abundance, and composition of crop species in national food supplies worldwide.

Genomics of Compositae crops: reference transcriptome assemblies and evidence of hybridization with wild relatives.

Although the Compositae harbours only two major food crops, sunflower and lettuce, many other species in this family are utilized by humans and have experienced various levels of domestication. Here, we have used next-generation sequencing technology to develop 15 reference transcriptome assemblies for Compositae crops or their wild relatives. These data allow us to gain insight into the evolutionary and genomic consequences of plant domestication.

Reproductive isolation during domestication.

It has been hypothesized that reproductive isolation should facilitate evolution under domestication. However, a systematic comparison of reproductive barrier strength between crops and their progenitors has not been conducted to test this hypothesis. Here, we present a systematic survey of reproductive barriers between 32 economically important crop species and their progenitors to better understand the role of reproductive isolation during the domestication process.

Ultra-barcoding in cacao (Theobroma spp.; Malvaceae) using whole chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA.

Premise Of Study: To reliably identify lineages below the species level such as subspecies or varieties, we propose an extension to DNA-barcoding using next-generation sequencing to produce whole organellar genomes and substantial nuclear ribosomal sequence. Because this method uses much longer versions of the traditional DNA-barcoding loci in the plastid and ribosomal DNA, we call our approach ultra-barcoding (UBC).

Methods: We used high-throughput next-generation sequencing to scan the genome and generate reliable sequence of high copy number regions.

Chloroplast microsatellite primers for cacao (Theobroma cacao) and other Malvaceae.

Premise Of The Study: Chloroplast microsatellites were developed in Theobroma cacao to examine the genetic diversity of cacao cultivars in Trinidad and Tobago.

Methods And Results: Nine polymorphic microsatellites were designed from the chloroplast genomes of two T. cacao accessions.

Establishing genomic tools and resources for Guizotia abyssinica (L.f.) Cass.-the development of a library of expressed sequence tags, microsatellite loci, and the sequencing of its chloroplast genome.

We present an EST library, chloroplast genome sequence, and nuclear microsatellite markers that were developed for the semi-domesticated oilseed crop noug (Guizotia abyssinica) from Ethiopia. The EST library consists of 25 711 Sanger reads, assembled into 17 538 contigs and singletons, of which 4781 were functionally annotated using the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR). The age distribution of duplicated genes in the EST library shows evidence of two paleopolyploidizations-a pattern that noug shares with several other species in the Heliantheae tribe (Compositae family).

Getting domestication straight: ramosa1 in maize.

Knowledge of the identities and characteristics of genes that govern the dramatic phenotypic differences between cultivated plants and their wild ancestors has greatly enhanced our understanding of the domestication process. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Sigmon & Vollbrecht report the discovery of a new maize domestication gene, ramosa1, which encodes a putative transcription factor in the ramosa developmental pathway. Ramosa1 appears to be instrumental in determining the straightness of kernel rows on the maize cob.

Adaptive evolution: the legacy of past giants.

The wire syndrome shared by plants in New Zealand and Madagascar appears to have evolved convergently as a defence against herbivory from now extinct avian giants.