Crop Wild Relatives (CWRs), the wild counterparts of cultivated crops, hold immense potential for addressing some of the most pressing challenges in agriculture today. They play an essential role for safeguarding agrobiodiversity, enhancing crop resi...
Crop wild relatives (CWR) are valuable wild plant species that can be used as genetic resources providing adaptive traits to crop plants and therefore they play an important role in future food security. This paper describes in situ and ex situ conse...
The crop and crop wild relative (CWR) checklist of Lithuania was created containing 2630 taxa. The checklist comprises 1384 native taxa including archaeophytes and 1246 neophytes. In total, 699 taxa (26.6%) are defined for food and forage use. A list...
Ex situ plant conservation in Poland is shaped by a dual institutional framework that distinguishes between agricultural genetic resources and the protection of rare and endangered wild flora. The National Centre for Plant Genetic Resources (NCPGR) f...
Crop wild relatives (CWR, plural CWRs) are those wild species that are regarded as the ancestors of our cultivated crops. It was only at the end of the last century that they were accorded a high priority for their conservation and, thus, for many ge...
Despite being an increasingly important source of genes for crop breeding aimed at improving food security and climate change adaptation, crop wild relatives (CWRs) are globally threatened. A root cause of CWR conservation challenges is a lack of ins...
Walker’s Manihot, Manihot walkerae, is an endangered species endemic to south Texas and northeastern Mexico and is a Crop Wild Relative (CWR) of the international and economically important crop cassava (M. esculenta). Manihot walkerae is globa...
The genus Allium L. includes economically significant crops such as Chinese chives (Allium tuberosum Rottler ex Spreng.) and onions (Allium cepa L.), and is utilized in diverse agricultural applications, with numerous cultivars developed to date. How...
Crop wild relatives (CWR) are a good source of useful alleles for climate change adaptation. Here, 19 durum wheat, 24 barley, and 24 lentil elites incorporating CWR in their pedigrees were yield tested against commercial checks across 19 environments...
Knowledge of the genetic diversity in populations of crop wild relatives (CWR) can inform effective strategies for their conservation and facilitate utilization to solve agricultural challenges. Two crop wild relatives of the cultivated cranberry are...
This study presents the status of ex situ and in situ conservation for the crop wild relatives of rice, potato, sweet potato, and finger millet in Brazil, and the subsequent germplasm collection expeditions. This research is part of a global initiati...
MIRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that play important roles in a wide range of biological processes in plant growth and development. MIR397 (involved in drought, low temperature, and nitrogen and copper (Cu) starvation) and MIR408 (differentially expr...
Crop wild relatives (CWR) have proven to be very valuable in agricultural breeding programs but remain a relatively under-utilized and under-protected resource. CWR have provided resistance to pests and diseases, abiotic stress tolerance, quality imp...
The aim of the present study was to investigate the genetic diversity and structure of eight Trifolium fragiferum populations in Latvia in the context of the Baltic Sea region. In addition, one wild population from Estonia and one from Denmark were a...
Ensuring global food security in the face of climate change is critical to human survival. With a predicted human population of 9.6 billion in 2050 and the demand for food supplies expected to increase by 60% globally, but with a parallel potential r...
The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change Project set out to improve the diversity, quantity, and accessibility of germplasm collections of crop wild relatives (CWR). Between 2013 and 2018, partners in 25 countries, heirs to the globetrotting legacy...
Global climate change is one of the major constraints limiting plant growth, production, and sustainability worldwide. Moreover, breeding efforts in the past years have focused on improving certain favorable crop traits, leading to genetic bottleneck...
The study presents an updated overview of the 29 endemic threatened Crop Wild Relatives (CWR) in Italy: Arrhenatherum elatius subsp. nebrodense, Barbarea rupicola, Brassica baldensis, Brassica glabrescens, Brassica macrocarpa, Brassica rupestris subs...
The narrow genomic diversity of modern cultivars is a major bottleneck for enhancing the crop’s salinity stress tolerance. The close relatives of modern cultivated plants, crop wild relatives (CWRs), can be a promising and sustainable resource...
Adaptation measures are necessary to ensure the stability and performance of the food supply relative to anthropogenic climate change. Although a wide range of measures have been proposed (e.g., planting dates, crop choices, drought resistance), ther...
The Poaceae is the second most abundant family among crop wild relatives in Poland, representing 147 taxa. From these species, 135 are native taxa, and 11 are archeophytes. In addition, one taxon is now considered to be extinct. Among the 147 taxa, 8...
Biological nitrogen fixation by legume-rhizobacterial symbiosis in temperate grasslands is an important source of soil nitrogen. The aim of the present study was to characterize the dependence of different accessions of T. fragiferum, a rare crop wil...
Shattercane (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench subsp. drummondii) and weedy sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) are two examples of crop wild relatives (CWRs) that have become troublesome weeds in agriculture. Shattercane is a race belonging to a different su...
Climate change and the variable extreme weather conditions that today’s agricultural producers are dealing with represent some of the most important issues in food production. Nowadays, weather patterns are increasingly unpredictable, character...
An updated overview of the 29 threatened crop wild relatives (CWRs) endemic to Italy is presented, namely: Arrhenatherum elatius subsp. nebrodense, Barbarea rupicola, Brassica baldensis, Brassica glabrescens, Brassica macrocarpa, Brassica rupestris s...
The study presents an updated overview of the 14 non-endemic threatened crop wild relatives (CWR) in Italy: Aegilops biuncialis, Ae. uniaristata, Ae. ventricosa, Asparagus pastorianus, Beta macrocarpa, Brassica insularis, B. montana, Crambe hispanica...
Plastids and mitochondria are organelles of plant cells with small genomes, which may exhibit discordant microevolution as we earlier revealed in pea crop wild relatives. We sequenced 22 plastid and mitochondrial genomes of Pisum sativum subsp. elati...
Insect pests pose a serious threat to global food production. Pod borer (Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner)) is one of the most destructive pests of leguminous crops. The use of host resistance has been an effective, environmentally friendly and sustainab...
Crop wild relatives are valuable as a genetic resource to develop new crop cultivars, better adapted to increasing environmental heterogeneity and being able to give high quality yields in a changing climate. The aim of the study was to evaluate the...
Domestication has resulted in a loss of genetic diversity in our major food crops, leading to susceptibility to biotic and abiotic stresses linked with climate change. Crop wild relatives (CWR) may provide a source of novel genes potentially importan...
Domesticated crops suffer from major genetic bottlenecks while wild relatives retain higher genomic diversity. Wild soybean (Glycine soja Sieb. & Zucc.) is the presumed ancestor of cultivated soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.), and is an important...
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor [L.] Moench) is a multipurpose food crop which is ranked among the top five cereal crops in the world. It serves as a source of food, fodder, feed and bioenergy. The genus Sorghum consists of 25 species and is considered as a...
Aegilops geniculata Roth is a tetraploid wild relative of wheat distributed throughout the Mediterranean Basin, where it grows in a wide range of habitats. Due to its genetic diversity, ecological plasticity and adaptation to Mediterranean ruderal en...
Salt stress is a major environmental constraint affecting plant growth and productivity. Crop wild relatives provide valuable genetic resources for stress tolerance, yet transcriptomic information for forest-derived wild species remains limited. In t...
Wild relatives of crops have the potential to improve food crops, especially in terms of improving abiotic stress tolerance. Two closely related wild species of the traditional East Asian legume crops, Azuki bean (Vigna angularis), V. riukiuensis &ld...
Global biodiversity hotspots are areas containing high levels of species richness, endemism and threat. Similarly, regions of agriculturally relevant diversity have been identified where many domesticated plants and animals originated, and co-occurre...
Humans have domesticated hundreds of plant and animal species as sources of food, fiber, forage, and tools over the past 12,000 years, with manifold effects on both human society and the genetic structure of the domesticated species. The outcomes of...
Providing hands-on education for the next generation of plant breeders would help maximize effectiveness of future breeding efforts. Such education should include training in introgression of crop wild relative alleles, which can increase genetic div...
Ex situ seed conservation of banana crop wild relatives (Musa spp. L.), is constrained by critical knowledge gaps in their storage and germination behaviour. Additionally, challenges in collecting seeds from wild populations impact the quality of see...
The enormous perennial monocotyledonous herb banana (Musa spp.), which includes dessert and cooking varieties, is found in more than 120 countries and is a member of the order Zingiberales and family Musaceae. The production of bananas requires a cer...
Plant genetic resources provide the basis for sustainable agricultural production, adaptation to climate change, and economic development. Many present crop plants are endangered due to extreme environmental conditions induced by climate change or du...
Adapting to climate change, providing sufficient human food and nutritional needs, and securing sufficient energy supplies will call for a radical transformation from the current conventional adaptation approaches to more broad-based and transformati...
The development of endophyte inoculants for agricultural crops has been bedevilled by the twin problems of a lack of reliability and consistency, with a consequent lack of belief among end users in the efficacy of such treatments. We have developed a...
Cereal production is of strategic importance to the world economy. Although the primary aim of breeding programs is to develop cultivars with improved agronomic performance, including high grain yield and grain quality, as well as disease and lodging...
Timothy grass (Phleum pratense L.) is one of the most important forage crops in temperate regions. Forage production, however, faces many challenges, and new cultivars adapted to a changing climate are needed. Wild populations and relatives of timoth...
Amaranthus is a genus of C4 dicotyledonous herbaceous plants, and three New World species have been domesticated to produce grain crops with light colored seed which are classified as pseudo-cereals rich in protein and minerals. A core collection of...
Plant biodiversity is the foundation of our present-day food supply (including functional food and medicine) and offers humankind multiple other benefits in terms of ecosystem functions and resilience to climate change, as well as other perturbations...
Crop wild relatives (CWRs) are critical resources for crop improvement and addressing food security. The genus Solanum includes many wild species genetically related to major crops. However, seed propagation methods for Solanum taxa distributed on th...
Drought stress is a major constraint in eggplant cultivation, limiting growth, physiological performance and yield. Solanum relatives may provide alleles for improving drought tolerance. The objective of this study was to evaluate the responses of cu...
Chloroplast (cp) genomics will play an important role in the characterization of crop wild relative germplasm conserved in worldwide gene banks, thanks to the advances in genome sequencing. We applied a multiplexed shotgun sequencing procedure to seq...
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