Wheat Landraces: A mini review <br>

Abstract

Traditional farmers planted diverse assemblages of wheat landraces to lower the risk of failure and increasefood security because they had limited capacity to control the spatially heterogeneous and temporallyunpredictable environments. This practice led to the development of landrace meta-populations of wheat andthe emergence of farmers ' seed systems through which they accessed and exchanged diverse genetic material.During the last ~50 years, the introduction of high-yielding wheat varieties into, and the structural changes inwheat farming systems in developing countries, led to the loss of genetic diversity and fragmentation of metapopulationstructures of wheat landraces from large parts of the Fertile Crescent, the center of origin anddiversity of wheat landraces. However, the persistence cultivation of some wheat landraces attests to theircontinued value to farmers, or to their competitive agronomic or nutritional advantage relative to modernvarieties. For farmers to continue to grow, select, and manage local wheat landraces, and to reverse thefragmentation of their meta-populations, especially in their center of diversity, and allow evolutionary processesthat mold landrace diversity to continue, their value should be raised to approximate or exceed the social valueof high-yielding wheat varieties. This review provides information on wheat domestication and the origin ofwheat landraces; their dynamic on-farm conservation and utilization in improving modern wheat cultivars andreversing the genetic erosion of wheat genetic diversity.