Contribution of landraces in wheat breeding

Abstract

Agricultural production system is extremely vulnerable to climate change, and this change will heavily affect the grain yields, thereby threating the food security worldwide. People from developing countries are at greatest risk of experiencing food insecurity, and today, millions of people are going to bed hungry. Wheat is serving as a staple food for millions of people around the world. Development of high-yielding wheat varieties during the Green Revolution is considered an important event in agricultural history. However, these plant breeding activities also resulted in genetic erosion in wheat. Moreover, it is also believed that after domestication process, selection process also resulted in the loss of genetic diversity of wheat. Therefore, commercial wheat cultivars are prone to various biotic and abiotic stresses. To combat with climate changes and to serve enough quantity of food with quality, there is a need to harness wheat landraces. Landraces are considered as repository of gene pool that enhance the biodiversity and maintain and stabilize the ecosystem in a sustainable way to make it functional. Wheat landraces are traditional crop populations developed by the farmers through natural and human selection under their years of cultivations and have adaptation to local environment and management practices. Wheat landraces have more genetic diversity compared to their cultivated ones, and breeding community has utilized their potential in development of climate-resilient wheat cultivars. Here, we are exploring the role of landraces in wheat breeding and hoping that provided information will catch the attention of breeding community to collect, conserve, and perform breeding activities using wheat landraces.