Wild Relatives are Plant Breeders Insurance Policy for Food Security

Wild relatives help preserve diversity for future plant breeding needs.

Crop wild relatives have evolved over millions of years, adapting to the environments in which they live in, making each population unique. When it comes to plant breeding, they’re an important source of genes to manage future stressors that face crop plants. This includes drought, new fungal pathogens and additional challenges that the world must combat due to climate change.

“When you consider plants collected from different areas in the world, they have evolved to adapt to that specific environment. That’s what makes them really useful for plant breeders,” says Alan Humphries, curator of the Australian Pastures Genebank, on the Feb. 8 episode of Seed Speaks.

Wild relatives have proven just how valuable they can be time and time again in the past. For example, the U.S. wild grape relative is utilized as a root stock to offer resistance to phylloxera for cultivated grapes. Lettuce’s Lactuca serriola, also known as prickly lettuce, provides resistance to downy mildew and were used to breed resistant varieties of head lettuce. Another wild species of lettuce, Lactuca virosa, gives cultivated lettuce resistance to lettuce aphid, according to Barbara Hellier, horticulture crops and Beta curator with the Western Regional Plant Introduction Station.