Back to the future for drought tolerance

Summary Global agriculture faces increasing pressure to produce more food with fewer resources. Drought, exacerbated by climate change, is a major agricultural constraint costing the industry an estimated US$80 billion per year in lost production. Wild relatives of domesticated crops, including whea...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The New phytologist 2024-04, Vol.242 (2), p.372-383
Main Authors: Guadarrama‐Escobar, Luis M., Hunt, James, Gurung, Allison, Zarco‐Tejada, Pablo J., Shabala, Sergey, Camino, Carlos, Hernandez, Pilar, Pourkheirandish, Mohammad
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carbon fixation
Cereal crops
Climate change
Criteria
Crops, Agricultural - genetics
de novo domestication
Domestication
Drought
Drought Resistance
Droughts
Gene pools
high‐throughput imaging
Hordeum vulgare
Phenotype
Phenotyping
stomata
Thermal imaging
Transpiration
transpiration efficiency
Triticum
water use efficiency
wild relatives
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Summary:Summary Global agriculture faces increasing pressure to produce more food with fewer resources. Drought, exacerbated by climate change, is a major agricultural constraint costing the industry an estimated US$80 billion per year in lost production. Wild relatives of domesticated crops, including wheat (Triticum spp.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), are an underutilized source of drought tolerance genes. However, managing their undesirable characteristics, assessing drought responses, and selecting lines with heritable traits remains a significant challenge. Here, we propose a novel strategy of using multi‐trait selection criteria based on high‐throughput spectral images to facilitate the assessment and selection challenge. The importance of measuring plant capacity for sustained carbon fixation under drought stress is explored, and an image‐based transpiration efficiency (iTE) index obtained via a combination of hyperspectral and thermal imaging, is proposed. Incorporating iTE along with other drought‐related variables in selection criteria will allow the identification of accessions with diverse tolerance mechanisms. A comprehensive approach that merges high‐throughput phenotyping and de novo domestication is proposed for developing drought‐tolerant prebreeding material and providing breeders with access to gene pools containing unexplored drought tolerance mechanisms.
ISSN:0028-646X
1469-8137
DOI:10.1111/nph.19619