When selection is strong and diverse alleles exist, many organisms can adapt rapidly to environmental change, sometimes in just a few generations. Traditional crop domestication has harnessed this very fact; populations are subjected to strong selection for a target trait, and the ‘winners’ carried forward in the breeding program. While this successful strategy has fed the world’s population to date, it limits opportunities for in-situ evolution, and creates crops that are dependent on increasingly limited external inputs (e.g. nitrogen and water), rather than crops that are locally adapted to complex biotic and abiotic environments. Informed by my diverse experience using evolutionary genomicsto study adaptation in viruses, bacteria, and wildlife, I argue that including an evolutionary angle in future crop development is necessary. Recent successes and emerging opportunities that I highlight include using wild-relative landscape genomics for functional variant discovery, manipulating the crop ‘hologenome’ by harnessing locally adapted microbes for drought tolerance, and overcoming crop’s inability to win the ‘arms race’ against pests or pathogens by introducing multiple resistance genes mined from phylogenetically distinct exposed populations.
When selection is strong and diverse alleles exist, many organisms can adapt rapidly to environmental change, sometimes in just a few generations. Traditional crop domestication has harnessed this very fact; populations are subjected to strong selection for a target trait, and the ‘winners’ carried forward in the breeding program. While this successful strategy has fed the world’s population to date, it limits opportunities for in-situ evolution, and creates crops that are dependent on increasingly limited external inputs (e.g. nitrogen and water), rather than crops that are locally adapted to complex biotic and abiotic environments. Informed by my diverse experience using evolutionary genomicsto study adaptation in viruses, bacteria, and wildlife, I argue that including an evolutionary angle in future crop development is necessary. Recent successes and emerging opportunities that I highlight include using wild-relative landscape genomics for functional variant discovery, manipulating the crop ‘hologenome’ by harnessing locally adapted microbes for drought tolerance, and overcoming crop’s inability to win the ‘arms race’ against pests or pathogens by introducing multiple resistance genes mined from phylogenetically distinct exposed populations.
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