Advancing designer crops for climate resilience through an integrated genomics approach

Abstract

Climate change and exponential population growth are exposing an immediate need for developing future crops that are highly resilient and adaptable to changing environments to maintain global food security in the next decade. Rigorous selection from long domestication history has rendered cultivated crops genetically disadvantaged, raising concerns in their ability to adapt to these new challenges and limiting their usefulness in breeding programmes. As a result, future crop improvement efforts must rely on integrating various genomic strategies ranging from high-throughput sequencing to machine learning, in order to exploit germplasm diversity and overcome bottlenecks created by domestication, expansive multi-dimensional phenotypes, arduous breeding processes, complex traits and big data.

Keywords: Climate change; Crop improvement; Crop phenomics; Crop wild relatives; Enviromics; Gene editing; Genome selection; Machine learning; Pangenome.