Future-Proofing Agriculture: De Novo Domestication for Sustainable and Resilient Crops

Abstract

The worldwide agricultural system confronts a significant challenge represented by the increasing demand for food in the face of a growing global population. This challenge is exacerbated by a reduction in cultivable land and the adverse effects of climate change on crop yield quantity and quality. Breeders actively embrace cutting-edge omics technologies to pursue resilient genotypes in response to these pressing issues. In this global context, new breeding techniques (NBTs) are emerging as the future of agriculture, offering a solution to introduce resilient crops that can ensure food security, particularly against challenging climate events. Indeed, the search for domestication genes as well as the genetic modification of these loci in wild species using genome editing tools are crucial steps in carrying out de novo domestication of wild plants without compromising their genetic background. Current knowledge allows us to take different paths from those taken by early Neolithic farmers, where crop domestication has opposed natural selection. In this process traits and alleles negatively correlated with high resource environment performance are probably eradicated through artificial selection, while others may have been lost randomly due to domestication and genetic bottlenecks. Thus, domestication led to highly productive plants with little genetic diversity, owing to the loss of valuable alleles that had evolved to tolerate biotic and abiotic stresses. Recent technological advances have increased the feasibility of de novo domestication of wild plants as a promising approach for crafting optimal crops while ensuring food security and using a more sustainable, low-input agriculture. Here, we explore what crucial domestication genes are, coupled with the advancement of technologies enabling the precise manipulation of target sequences, pointing out de novo domestication as a promising application for future crop development.