Evolutionary Plant Breeding in Cereals—Into a New Era

By T. Döring, Samuel Knapp, G. Kovács, K. Murphy, M. Wolfe. 2011

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In evolutionary plant breeding, crop populations with a high level of genetic diversity are subjected to the forces of natural selection. In a cycle of sowing and re-sowing seed from the plant population year after year, those plants favored under prevailing growing conditions are expected to contribute more seed to the next generation than plants with lower fitness. Thus, evolving crop populations have the capability of adapting to the conditions under which they are grown. Here we review the current state of research in evolutionary plant breeding and concentrate on the ability of evolving plant populations to deal with stressful, variable, and unpredictable environments. This resilience of evolving plant populations is seen as a major advantage under the predicted threats faced by agriculture such as global climate change. We have conducted an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of this breeding approach and suggest how its concept can be broadened and expanded. Given the current legal restrictions for realizing the potential of evolutionary plant breeding, we call for a change in legislation to allow evolving crop populations to enter agricultural practice on a larger scale.

Subfields: Genetics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/036f582539395d13fd10080718fdd36d55dbe166

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. M. Jeger
2. T. Döring
3. Marco Pautasso

In Plant Science

1. Marco Pautasso
2. M. Jeger
3. T. Döring
4. A. Costanzo
5. P. Bàrberi
6. M. Garbelotto
7. Ross K. Meentemeyer

Citations in the corpus

• Functional agrobiodiversity and agroecosystem services in sustainable wheat production. A review (2013, background): “The choice of parental germplasm can be very important in predicting the evolution of a composite cross population identity (Döring et al. 2011).”
• Impacts of climate change on plant diseases—opinions and trends (2012, background): “Equally, the greater integration of plant diversity in production systems is expected to buffer against the unpredicted or unpredictable alterations that pathosystems will experience in a changing climate (Østergård et al. 2009; Brummer et al. 2011; Döring et al. 2011; Jarvis et al. 2011).”