Using Biotechnology-Led Approaches to Uplift Cereal and Food Legume Yields in Dryland Environments

Sangam L Dwivedi; Kadambot H M Siddique; Muhammad Farooq; Philip K Thornton; Rodomiro Ortiz

doi:10.3389/fpls.2018.01249

Using Biotechnology-Led Approaches to Uplift Cereal and Food Legume Yields in Dryland Environments

Front Plant Sci. 2018 Aug 27:9:1249. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2018.01249. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Sangam L Dwivedi¹, Kadambot H M Siddique², Muhammad Farooq^{2

3

4}, Philip K Thornton⁵, Rodomiro Ortiz⁶

Affiliations

¹ Independent Researcher, Hyderabad, India.
² The UWA Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia.
³ Department of Crop Sciences, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Al Khoud, Oman.
⁴ University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan.
⁵ CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi, Kenya.
⁶ Department of Plant Breeding, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden.

Abstract

Drought and heat in dryland agriculture challenge the enhancement of crop productivity and threaten global food security. This review is centered on harnessing genetic variation through biotechnology-led approaches to select for increased productivity and stress tolerance that will enhance crop adaptation in dryland environments. Peer-reviewed literature, mostly from the last decade and involving experiments with at least two seasons' data, form the basis of this review. It begins by highlighting the adverse impact of the increasing intensity and duration of drought and heat stress due to global warming on crop productivity and its impact on food and nutritional security in dryland environments. This is followed by (1) an overview of the physiological and molecular basis of plant adaptation to elevated CO₂ (eCO₂), drought, and heat stress; (2) the critical role of high-throughput phenotyping platforms to study phenomes and genomes to increase breeding efficiency; (3) opportunities to enhance stress tolerance and productivity in food crops (cereals and grain legumes) by deploying biotechnology-led approaches [pyramiding quantitative trait loci (QTL), genomic selection, marker-assisted recurrent selection, epigenetic variation, genome editing, and transgene) and inducing flowering independent of environmental clues to match the length of growing season; (4) opportunities to increase productivity in C₃ crops by harnessing novel variations (genes and network) in crops' (C₃, C₄) germplasm pools associated with increased photosynthesis; and (5) the adoption, impact, risk assessment, and enabling policy environments to scale up the adoption of seed-technology to enhance food and nutritional security. This synthesis of technological innovations and insights in seed-based technology offers crop genetic enhancers further opportunities to increase crop productivity in dryland environments.

Keywords: adoption and impact; applied genomics; gene editing; global warming; phenomics; photosynthesis; stress-tolerant cultivar; transgene.

Publication types

Review