scholarly journals Next-Generation Breeding Strategies for Climate-Ready Crops

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Razzaq ◽  
Parwinder Kaur ◽  
Naheed Akhter ◽  
Shabir Hussain Wani ◽  
Fozia Saleem

Climate change is a threat to global food security due to the reduction of crop productivity around the globe. Food security is a matter of concern for stakeholders and policymakers as the global population is predicted to bypass 10 billion in the coming years. Crop improvement via modern breeding techniques along with efficient agronomic practices innovations in microbiome applications, and exploiting the natural variations in underutilized crops is an excellent way forward to fulfill future food requirements. In this review, we describe the next-generation breeding tools that can be used to increase crop production by developing climate-resilient superior genotypes to cope with the future challenges of global food security. Recent innovations in genomic-assisted breeding (GAB) strategies allow the construction of highly annotated crop pan-genomes to give a snapshot of the full landscape of genetic diversity (GD) and recapture the lost gene repertoire of a species. Pan-genomes provide new platforms to exploit these unique genes or genetic variation for optimizing breeding programs. The advent of next-generation clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/CRISPR-associated (CRISPR/Cas) systems, such as prime editing, base editing, and de nova domestication, has institutionalized the idea that genome editing is revamped for crop improvement. Also, the availability of versatile Cas orthologs, including Cas9, Cas12, Cas13, and Cas14, improved the editing efficiency. Now, the CRISPR/Cas systems have numerous applications in crop research and successfully edit the major crop to develop resistance against abiotic and biotic stress. By adopting high-throughput phenotyping approaches and big data analytics tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), agriculture is heading toward automation or digitalization. The integration of speed breeding with genomic and phenomic tools can allow rapid gene identifications and ultimately accelerate crop improvement programs. In addition, the integration of next-generation multidisciplinary breeding platforms can open exciting avenues to develop climate-ready crops toward global food security.

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 1950-1976
Author(s):  
Adnan Rasheed ◽  
Rafaqat Ali Gill ◽  
Muhammad Umair Hassan ◽  
Athar Mahmood ◽  
Sameer Qari ◽  
...  

Genome editing (GE) has revolutionized the biological sciences by creating a novel approach for manipulating the genomes of living organisms. Many tools have been developed in recent years to enable the editing of complex genomes. Therefore, a reliable and rapid approach for increasing yield and tolerance to various environmental stresses is necessary to sustain agricultural crop production for global food security. This critical review elaborates the GE tools used for crop improvement. These tools include mega-nucleases (MNs), such as zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), and transcriptional activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR). Specifically, this review addresses the latest advancements in the role of CRISPR/Cas9 for genome manipulation for major crop improvement, including yield and quality development of biotic stress- and abiotic stress-tolerant crops. Implementation of this technique will lead to the production of non-transgene crops with preferred characteristics that can result in enhanced yield capacity under various environmental stresses. The CRISPR/Cas9 technique can be combined with current and potential breeding methods (e.g., speed breeding and omics-assisted breeding) to enhance agricultural productivity to ensure food security. We have also discussed the challenges and limitations of CRISPR/Cas9. This information will be useful to plant breeders and researchers in the thorough investigation of the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to boost crops by targeting the gene of interest.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Kornhuber ◽  
Corey Lesk ◽  
Peter Pfleiderer ◽  
Jonas Jägermeyer ◽  
Carl-Friedrich Schleussner ◽  
...  

<p>In a strongly interconnected world, simultaneous extreme weather events in far-away regions could potentially impose high-end risks for societies. In the mid-latitudes, amplified Rossby waves are associated with a strongly meandering jet-stream causing simultaneous heatwaves and floods across multiple major crop producing regions simultaneously with detrimental effects on harvests and potential implications for global food security.</p><p>While no scientific consensus on future changes in these wave events has been established so far, impacts of associated extremes are expected to become more severe due to thermodynamic factors alone, possibly enhancing crop production co-variability across major breadbasket regions and amplifying future risks of multiple harvest failures.</p><p>Quantifying future changes in crop co-variability linked to amplified Rossby waves faces a key challenge: Models need to exhibit sufficient skill along a chain of complex and non-linear features, namely i. Rossby Wave characteristics, ii. location and magnitude of associated surface extremes and iii. respective yield response. Here we investigate those relationships in the latest CMIP6 and GGCMI model simulations, providing preliminary results on future changes in crop production co-variability, linked to amplified Rossby waves.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Razzaq ◽  
Wajiha Guul ◽  
Muhammad Sarwar Khan ◽  
Fozia Saleem

: Wheat is a widely cultivated cereal, consumed by nearly 80% of the total population in the world. Although wheat is growing on 215 million hectares annually, its production is still inadequate to meet the future demand of feeding the 10 billion human population. Global food security is the biggest challenge as climate change is threatening crop production. There is a need to fast-track the wheat breeding by devising modern biotechnological tools. Climate-smart wheat having greater stress resilience, better adaptability and improved agronomic traits are vital to guarantee food security. Substantial understanding and knowledge of vital biochemical pathways and regulatory networks is required for achieving stress resilience in wheat. Metabolomics has emerged as a fascinating technology to speed up the crop improvement programs by deciphering unique metabolic pathways for abiotic/biotic stress tolerance. State-of-the-art metabolomics tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and advanced mass spectrometry (MS) has opened new horizons for detailed analysis of wheat metabolome. The identification of unique metabolic pathways offers various types of stress tolerance and helps to screen the elite wheat cultivars. In this review, we summarize the applications of metabolomics to probe the stressresponsive metabolites and stress-inducive regulatory pathways that govern abiotic/biotic stress tolerance in wheat and highlight the significance of metabolic profiling to characterize wheat agronomics traits. Furthermore, we also describe the potential of metabolomics-assisted speed breeding for wheat improvement and propose future directions.


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 912
Author(s):  
Huirong Dong ◽  
Yong Huang ◽  
Kejian Wang

The rapid increase in herbicide-resistant weeds creates a huge challenge to global food security because it can reduce crop production, causing considerable losses. Combined with a lack of novel herbicides, cultivating herbicide-resistant crops becomes an effective strategy to control weeds because of reduced crop phytotoxicity, and it expands the herbicidal spectrum. Recently developed clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR/Cas)-mediated genome editing techniques enable efficiently targeted modification and hold great potential in creating desired plants with herbicide resistance. In the present review, we briefly summarize the mechanism responsible for herbicide resistance in plants and then discuss the applications of traditional mutagenesis and transgenic breeding in cultivating herbicide-resistant crops. We mainly emphasize the development and use of CRISPR/Cas technology in herbicide-resistant crop improvement. Finally, we discuss the future applications of the CRISPR/Cas system for developing herbicide-resistant crops.


Author(s):  
P.B Reddy

Genetically Modified organisms (GMOs) are a tool of solution in helping to tackle the challenge of global food security for ever growing population. With global population expected to grow by 40% in the next few decades, agriculture will need to become more productive and more sustainable in order to keep pace with rapidly increasing demands. The current biotechnology permits to alter the genetic makeup of living organisms to produce much quicker and beneficial results. The present study is aimed to evaluate the economic, environmental and nutritive benefits of transgenic crops. We have reviewed many articles from various journals, blogs and media clips related to the subject. Results indicate that the use of GMOs have many potential benefits that include increased crop production, improved nutrition, and drought tolerance, reduced fertilizers and pesticides, better environmental condition, improved economic benefits and improvement in fruit storage. Conversely, there are few concerns about possible unpredicted adverse health effects, environmental damage, gene pollution and business exploitation. Results also indicate the towering costs and uncertainty about the guidelines of GMOs have slowed the rate of innovation of new qualities and prevented set ups and major corporate sectors from developing many second-generation varieties to facilitate the improvement of our well-being.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1507
Author(s):  
Santiago L. Poggio ◽  
Sarina Macfadyen ◽  
David A. Bohan

Ecological intensification has been proposed as a paradigm for ensuring global food security while preserving biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. Ecological intensification was originally coined to promote precise site-specific farming practices aimed at reducing yield gaps, while avoiding negative environmental impacts (techno-simplicity). Recently, it has been extended to stress the importance of landscape complexity to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services (eco-complexity). While these perspectives on ecological intensification may seem distinct, they are not incompatible and should be interwoven to create more comprehensive and practical solutions. Here, we argue that designing cropping systems to be more diverse, across space and time would be an effective route to accomplish environmentally-friendly intensification of crop production. Such a novel approach will require better integration of knowledge at the landscape level for increasing agro-biodiversity (focused on interventions outside fields) with strategies diversifying cropping systems to manage weeds and pests (focused on interventions inside fields).


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Fatma Sarsu

Mutation breeding for crop improvement is a technique used for over 70 years. It is a fast way to increase the rate of spontaneous genetic variation in plants contributing to global food security.  The genetic variability, created through mutagenesis i.e. physical or chemical, is an important breeding material for developing improved varieties and many studies in the field of functional genomics. The randomly generated heritable genetic changes are expressed in the mutant plants, which are selected for new and useful traits, such as high yielding, disease resistance, tolerance to abiotic stresses and improved nutritional quality. The technique helps to improve the tolerance of crop species to adverse climatic conditions, such as extremes of temperatures, drought, occurrence of pests and diseases. Through support provided by the Joint FAO/IAEA Division, significant agronomic and economic impact has been generated in many countries. The FAO/IAEA Mutant Variety Database (MVD) (http://mvd.iaea.org) demonstrates the significance of mutation induction as an efficient tool in crop improvement. The extensive use of induced mutant germplasms in crop improvement programmes resulted in releasing of more than 3,332 mutant varieties from around 228 crop species (20 July 2020).


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 5:1-5:11 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Badr ◽  
L. J. Klein ◽  
M. Freitag ◽  
C. M. Albrecht ◽  
F. J. Marianno ◽  
...  

Plants ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177
Author(s):  
Gokhan Hacisalihoglu

Global food security and sustainability in the time of pandemics (COVID-19) and a growing world population are important challenges that will require optimized crop productivity under the anticipated effects of climate change [...]


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