Abstract
Global agriculture production is under serious threat from rapidly increasing population and adverse climate changes. Food security is currently a huge challenge to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Crop domestication through conventional approaches is not good enough to meet the food demands and unable to fast-track the crop yields. Also, intensive breeding and rigorous selection of superior traits causes genetic erosion and eliminates stress-responsive genes, which makes crops more prone to abiotic stresses. Salt stress is one of the most prevailing abiotic stresses that poses severe damages to crop yield around the globe. Recent innovations in state-of-the-art genomics and transcriptomics technologies have paved the way to develop salinity tolerant crops. De novo domestication is one of the promising strategies to produce superior new crop genotypes through exploiting the genetic diversity of crop wild relatives (CWRs). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies open new avenues to identifying the unique salt-tolerant genes from the CWRs. It has also led to the assembly of highly annotated crop pan-genomes to snapshot the full landscape of genetic diversity and recapture the huge gene repertoire of a species. The identification of novel genes alongside the emergence of cutting-edge genome editing tools for targeted manipulation renders de novo domestication a way forward for developing salt-tolerance crops. However, some risk associated with gene-edited crops causes hurdles for its adoption worldwide. Halophytes-led breeding for salinity tolerance provides an alternative strategy to identify extremely salt tolerant varieties that can be used to develop new crops to mitigate salinity stress.
Highlights
Ali Razzaq 1, Fozia Saleem 1, Shabir Hussain Wani 2, Shaimaa A
Food security and climate change are the main reasons for continuous innovations in modern breeding approaches in order to produce enough food for a rapidly growing population
De novo domestication has emerged as a powerful strategy to accelerate the natural breeding process by reintroducing the unique domesticated genes from the crop wild relatives (CWRs) to cultivated genotypes and to domesticate the CWRs with agronomically important traits to improve their yield and nutritional value
Summary
Food security remains the top priority for all the stakeholders and policymakers to ensure food availability to everyone, while climate changes and rapid population growth are the major obstacles to achieve this goal (Lesk et al, 2016; Myers et al, 2017). The annual crop yield must be accelerated in order to keep the sustainable crop production despite the challenges of climate stresses and population growth (Tilman et al, 2011; Ray et al, 2013) These multi-dimensional factors need a major transformation of agricultural productions systems (Lenaerts et al, 2019). The green revolution in the 1960s led to an remarkable boost in crop output per area and put greater pressure for sustainable agriculture production (Østerberg et al, 2017) These conventional breeding approaches are unable to keep the pace for crop yield in postgreen revolution due to reduction in genetic diversity, and crops became more susceptible to climatic stresses (Tilman et al, 2002). We discuss the pitfall remains and propose future outlooks
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