Do Wild Varieties of Crops Hold the Key To Developing More Resilient Agriculture?

As hostile weather intensifies, plant breeding focused on climate-adapted crops has taken on a sense of urgency. 

With cultivated crops often suffering from a lack of genetic diversity making them more susceptible to diseases and pests, scientists are now turning to wild varieties, which can offer valuable yet previously overlooked genetic traits. By crossing the wild tepary bean with a black bean or a pinto bean, for example, scientists may be able to breed a new variety that can better endure similar harsh environmental conditions that its relative thrived in.

Wild crop relatives may be tough, but typically lack traits—such as good taste and rapid growth—that farmers want. The question, then, is how to develop new species that preserve the desirable traits of cultivated breeds, but are able to survive trying conditions.

Conventional breeding is not without limitations. It can often take many years to produce desired results, and selecting specific genetic characteristics without pulling in unwanted traits can be difficult.

Advances in genetic technologies have made it possible to speed up plant breeding. A plant’s genes are like a blueprint, outlining how it will look and what traits it will have. Plant geneticists can identify specific genes of interest in those blueprints more quickly than they have in the past, due largely to increasingly powerful DNA sequencing.

For example, scientists at McGill University, including Department of Plant Science Chair Martina Strömvik, have used gene banks to sequence the DNA of nearly 300 types of potatoes, including wild varieties, to create a “super pangenome”—a species’ entire set of genes. Sequencing the DNA is something like a roadmap that makes it easier to select traits that make potatoes more resistant to disease and environmental burdens, said Shelley Jansky, a longtime research geneticist with the USDA.

“That pangenome really gives us a very powerful tool for manipulating the genetics of the potato and creating potato plants that are better than what we have,” said Jansky, who recently retired and was not involved in the research, but specializes in potato genetics.

By reading and identifying the genetic information contained in the cells of plants, the years it takes to develop a new crop variety can be reduced from up to two decades to just a few years.