Utilization of Wild Food Plants for Crop Improvement Programs

Abstract

Crop wild relatives or wild plants related to domesticated crops are potential resources for crop improvement. They can be landraces, crop progenitors, and plants closely related to the taxa and are not part of agricultural history. They are enriched with gene pools that are capable of revolutionizing current agriculture. As they possess allelic variations necessary for disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, nutritional value, and ecological adaptations, proper utilization of these better characteristics from wild crop relatives for crop improvement programs can change the agricultural landscape of the world. Presently, the majority of crops have less allelic diversity than their wild relatives and they are susceptible to diseases and other abiotic and biotic stresses, which is also known as the domestication bottleneck. The major cause of the domestication bottleneck was demand for high-yielding varieties and unintended neglectence of other characteristics. But in the wild crop relatives, all such genes were preserved and agricultural scientists started to create new improved lines of crops from crop wild relatives since the 1940s. Advancement in technologies should be reflected in the advancement of crop wild relative dependent crop improvement programs also. Here, we summarize the utilization of wild crops for crop improvement programs through various strategies such as genetic mapping, transgenic approaches, application of genomic tools, and gene editing.