Abstract
Evolutionary Applications research highlights for issue 9: the ever-evolving field of agriculture.
Highlights
The earliest application of evolutionary theory, unknowingly at the time, was artificial selection of crops and animals for food production
Ever increasing technical advances in breeding, genetic engineering and comparative genomics have since led to a rapid acceleration in the rate of such selection, many of the basic principles underlying the process have remained the same over time
Jeremy Burdon and coauthors review the success of strategies such as stacking resistance genes, introducing partial or adult-only resistance, or using mixtures of host types to hinder pathogen evolution (Burdon et al 2014)
Summary
Evolutionary Applications research highlights for issue 9: the ever-evolving field of agriculture. Recent work by Julia Hillung and colleagues examined the adaptation of a plant RNA virus to various ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana in order to determine the specificity and consequences of evolution on one host to infectivity on another They use experimental evolution to show rapid increases in infectivity and virulence on the host background in which the virus has been adapted, and demonstrate that some host types select for viral populations that are more generally infective to other types (Hillung et al 2014). These results are intriguing in that they suggest manipulation of host types in an agricultural setting could predictably alter the outcome of pathogen evolution Such rapid evolution is not restricted to the laboratory; evidence from the Western corn rootworm on maize crops indicates that the pest is evolving resistance to the toxins produced by genetically engineered plants that were introduced into production only in 2003 (Gassmann et al 2014). The increasingly clear role of the microbiomes across the rhizosphere and phyllosphere suggest great
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