Abstract
Climate change will have major impacts on crop production: not just increasing drought and heat stress, but also increasing insect and disease loads and the chance of extreme weather events and further adverse conditions. Often, wild relatives show increased tolerances to biotic and abiotic stresses, due to reduced stringency of selection for yield and yield-related traits under optimum conditions. One possible strategy to improve resilience in our modern-day crop cultivars is to utilize wild relative germplasm in breeding, and attempt to introgress genetic factors contributing to greater environmental tolerances from these wild relatives into elite crop types. However, this approach can be difficult, as it relies on factors such as ease of hybridization and genetic distance between the source and target, crossover frequencies and distributions in the hybrid, and ability to select for desirable introgressions while minimizing linkage drag. In this review, we outline the possible effects that climate change may have on crop production, introduce the Brassica crop species and their wild relatives, and provide an index of useful traits that are known to be present in each of these species that may be exploitable through interspecific hybridization-based approaches. Subsequently, we outline how introgression breeding works, what factors affect the success of this approach, and how this approach can be optimized so as to increase the chance of recovering the desired introgression lines. Our review provides a working guide to the use of wild relatives and related crop germplasm to improve biotic and abiotic resistances in Brassica crop species.
Highlights
Climate change will result in a higher frequency of extreme weather events and increased pest and disease loads
Different Brassica genotypes and allies from diverse origins were tested against Pseudocercosporella capsellae in field and/or controlled conditions, and genotypes from B. carinata, B. juncea, B. napus, B. oleracea and B. fruticulosa shown to be highly resistant (Gunasinghe et al 2014, 2017)
We introduce potential impacts of climate change on crop production and the Brassicaceae crops, provide a reference for useful traits present in each of the Brassica “Triangle of U” species and offer concrete advice for structuring and optimizing introgression breeding programs
Summary
Each of the six major cultivated Brassica species contains unique, potentially useful agronomic traits that can be utilized to improve elite cultivars or to increase the gene pool within a species. While each species is often strongly associated with a particular phenotype, e.g. such that B. napus is widely known as a high yielding oilseed crop (76 MT produced in 2007, FAOSTATS) and B. oleracea as a highly variable vegetable type (Cheng et al 2016), many traits present in individual species can be transferred between these closely related species for crop improvement. In the year 2009, a compendium of known traits in Brassica and wild relatives was published (Warwick et al 2009). Many other genotypes carrying relevant traits for agronomic improvement have been found in different Brassica accessions
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