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AGRICULTURAL GENETICS

From stinkweed to oilseed

Nature Food volume 1, pages 24–25 (2020)Cite this article

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Up to now, creativity, ingenuity, time and more than a little luck have been essential for transforming a wild plant into a new food crop. Building on the understanding of gene function in Arabidopsis, the process of domestication can be rapidly accelerated.

The domestication of a wild plant species begins with the identification of rare, desirable, heritable changes, followed by many generations of inter-crossing and phenotypic screening to combine, or ‘stack’, the improved traits. This process, employed to generate leafy vegetables, oil seed crops and root crops from the wild species Brassica rapa1, traditionally could have taken place over hundreds of years. In the twentieth century, the development of artificial mutagens greatly accelerated the rate of discovery of improved or novel traits, and the invention of DNA-marker-assisted selection allowed breeders to identify segregates of interest by seedling genotyping rather than waiting for trait expression in mature plants1 — thereby saving time, space and resources. This process is used to improve existing crops, but the development of a really new crop is a rare event.

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References

  1. Jiang, G. L. in Advances in Plant Breeding Strategies: Breeding, Biotechnology and Molecular Tools (eds Al-Khayri, J. et al.) 431–472 (Springer, 2015).

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  1. Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences, University of California - Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Anne B. Britt

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  1. Anne B. Britt
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Correspondence to Anne B. Britt.

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Britt, A.B. From stinkweed to oilseed. Nat Food 1, 24–25 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-019-0016-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-019-0016-y

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