Professor Mark Cooper and Shunichiro Tomura with trial pots of Arabidopsis thaliana at UQ's Plant Futures Facility.
(Photo credit: The University of Queensland )
Modern agriculture's selective breeding of crops for particular requirements may now be a roadblock for further gains, prompting a trio of senior University of Queensland plant scientists to call for a new way forward.
Professor Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos said while plant breeders had delivered remarkable outcomes in maize, wheat, rice and soybean over the past century, each next breakthrough was becoming harder to achieve.
"Even with the best efforts and rapid advances in genomics, computing and breeding technologies, genetic gains have been slowing," Professor Ortiz-Barrientos said.
"We have produced crops that are more productive, more reliable and better suited to farming systems than ever before by focusing on harvestability, planting density, fertiliser use, irrigation management, disease resistance and grain quality.
"But it has channelled breeding efforts into increasingly narrow pathways, restricting which genetic combinations get tested and developed.
"The gene interactions have not disappeared from crops, but they sit outside the range of trait combinations that breeding programmes can see, which makes crop genetics look simpler than it is.
"The combinations that have fallen by the wayside could hold part of the answer to improving future crop performance, but they've not been explored."
Professor Ortiz-Barrientos and colleagues Professor Mark Cooper and Professor David Jordan have proposed a framework for overcoming the research roadblock.
Professor Cooper said a new way of thinking about crop improvement could help feed a growing global population amid the challenges of climate variability, heat stress, drought and changing environmental conditions.
"If we can identify ways to access the genetic variation that hasn't been studied, we may be able to create new opportunities for productivity, resilience and adaptation," Professor Cooper said.
"Breeders could explore this hidden genetic potential through wider crosses between genetically diverse plants including looking more at wild relatives.
"We could also be testing crops across more diverse environments and management systems, and using emerging technologies such as gene editing."
The researchers said future progress would require closer collaboration between breeders, agronomists, researchers and farmers.
Professor Ortiz-Barrientos said farmers were central to the process because they experience first-hand the challenges that future crop varieties must solve.
"Growers are dealing with changing conditions and making decisions every season about managing risk," he said.
"The next generation of crop improvement will depend on bringing everyone together to explore new possibilities while maintaining the reliability agriculture depends on."
Read the research published in Nature Plants.
Collaboration and acknowledgements
The researchers work at UQ's School of the Environment , the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture .
