![]() Therefore, the current scenario with insufficient genetic and phenotypic information imposes a major, if not the major, obstacle for the use of this extant genetic variation 6. This is not a trivial task if it is considered that around 856,168 wheat accessions are hosted in genebanks world-wide 10. Nevertheless, prior to the use of genetic resources for breeding, accessions with beneficial traits have to be identified 9. In order to adapt wheat to these future demands, the use of genetic variation harbored within plant genetic resource collections has been frequently suggested 6, 7, 8. Additionally, limited arable land, the urgent need for more sustainable agriculture, the loss of biodiversity, changing socio-economic conditions in developing countries along with more-often occurring abiotic and biotic stress conditions due the climate change, pose further challenges for food production and food security 5. Moreover, in some important wheat growing regions of Europe the yield progress is even stagnated since almost 20 years 4. However, cereal production was merely increased by 1.46% during the last growing season 1 and the current global annual wheat yield progress of 0.9% will be also insufficient to meet the future human needs 3. ![]() For feeding 9 billion people by the year 2050 food production must be doubled corresponding to an annual growth rate of 2.4% 3. The global cereal production amounted to 2.65 billion tons during the 2016–2017 growing season, with maize, wheat, and rice being the most relevant crops, accounting for 41.16%, 28.55%, and 19.04%, respectively 1. A first important step could consist in unlocking their historical data treasures that allows an educated choice of accessions by scientists and breeders. We encourage international and national genebanks to increase their efforts to transform into bio-digital resource centers. In this way, ready-to-use processed phenotypic data across regeneration years were generated and further validated. Supported by historical weather observations outliers were removed following a previously described quality assessment pipeline. ![]() This study provides non-orthogonal historical data of 12,754 spring and winter wheat accessions characterized for flowering time, plant height, and thousand grain weight during 70 years of seed regeneration at the German genebank. To warrant the seed integrity of individual accessions during periodical regeneration cycles in the field phenotypic characterizations are performed. However, the scarcity of phenotypic and genotypic characterization of genebank accessions severely restricts their use in plant breeding. ![]() Genebanks are valuable sources of genetic diversity, which can help to cope with future problems of global food security caused by a continuously growing population, stagnating yields and climate change. ![]()
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