This workshop will assemble a diverse group of scientists from around the world for a 3 day meeting in December 2012 to assess the potential of modern "omics" techniques to help unlock the genetic potential of crop wild relatives to enhance the efficiency of crop improvement. Crop wild relatives are increasingly recognized as critical to breeding efforts aimed at adapting agriculture to climate change. Genomics has the potential to help us better understand and more efficiently use wild relatives in crop improvement. This conference will provide a forum for (a) exploring essential gaps in our understanding of diverse crop wild relatives, (b) understanding the potential of genomics technologies to help bridge those gaps, (c) exchanging information and sharing perspectives among a diverse group of scientists, and (d) building an interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in using genomics-based approaches to exploit the wealth of genetic variation found in crop wild relatives. The workshop will help strengthen interactions among scientists from both public and private sector institutions so as to enhance global food security.
A group of 50 scientists from 14 different countries representing public and private sector institutions and a wide range of disciplinary expertise convened a 2 1⁄2 day conference (Dec. 11-13, 2012) to discuss strategies and opportunities for harnessing the power of modern genomics, phenomics and informatics to unlock the genetic potential of wild crop relatives for crop improvement. The world’s population is predicted to reach 9 billion people by 2050, presenting a formidable challenge in terms of how we are to produce enough food in a sustainable way. In the face of limited land, water and other resources, the main hope for boosting global food production is the development of higher yielding crops. These crops must not only be well-adapted to current environmental conditions, but they must also be resilient to the extreme weather events and multiple new strains of pests and pathogens expected to become more prevalent with climate change. This essential effort will require access to a broad base of genetic diversity. Crop domestication led to a severe reduction in genetic variation within crops when compared to their wild progenitors (‘domestication bottleneck’). A much wider spectrum of diversity occurs in the wild relatives of today’s crops. Many breeders are therefore keen to reach back into the predomesticated gene pool and capture the many valuable genes and traits found in crop wild relatives (CWRs). CWRs are increasingly recognized as critical to breeding efforts aimed at adapting agriculture to climate change. Breeding with CWRs can be challenging because of reproductive barriers that isolate many crops from their wild progenitors. These "sterility barriers" restrict the breeders’ ability to make crosses between wild and domesticated materials. As a consequence, the extensive genetic diversity that exists in CWRs remains a relatively untapped reservoir. Genomics has the potential to help unlock genetic diversity contained in CWR and to more efficiently move traits (genes) into elite germplasm. To efficiently tap CWR, gaps in genotyping, phenotyping, and bioinformatics technologies, as well as in the development of integrative models/algorithms for interpreting this information in the context of breeding must be explored. This conference provided a forum for discussing these existing gaps, and strategic recommendations for a way forward were summarized in a white paper that was published in Nature on July 4, 2013 entitled "Feeding the Future". Participants were asked to tackle a set of core questions, organized around a set of keynote presentations followed by breakout sessions organized around carefully selected groups of participants to ensure diverse disciplinary perspectives, species-specific expertise and public and private sector views. Day 1: presentations and discussions included: how to best measure genetic variation across species, how to prioritize genotyping and phenotyping across different crop species, and how to provide access to information on CWR to the plant breeding and research communities. Day 2: we discussed why we have not been more effective in utilizing CWR, tried to identify key bottlenecks and how to overcome them, and in the afternoon we had extensive breakout sessions focused on specific plant families to highlight the priorities, possibilities and bottlenecks that were peculiar to each. Day 3: we engaged in a Plenary Discussion focused on the steps that need to be taken toward a "Big Vision Project" that would support genomics-based characterization of CWRs and outlined the kinds of collaboration and partnerships that would be key to implementing the vision. Following the meeting, there has been extensive discussion among participants and meeting organizers about next steps. In the Nature article, we succinctly laid out three steps to help catalyze the ability to mine biodiversity for crop improvement, particularly the underutilized diversity found in CWRs: (1) a global effort to sequence the genomes of all publicly available Gene Bank accessions, (2) a strategic effort to phenotype key plant materials, guided by genome sequencing information, to provide the basis for more efficient utilization of traits from CWR, and (3) to create an internationally accessible informatics infrastructure to catalogue the diversity in the world’s seed collections, linking seeds and genetic stocks directly to passport, genomic and phenotypic information. We have received several comments and responses since this article was published, attesting to the impact it had on the community. Two of those responses were published as Correspondence in the July 25 issue of Nature: "Future food: politics plague seed banks" and "Future food: use local knowledge". We also received comments and requests for reprints from scientists around the world. A follow up meeting that will be held from Jan. 9-10, 2014 in San Diego, CA, preceding the Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) meeting. The San Diego 2014 meeting is being organized jointly by Hannes Dempewolf, Loren Rieseberg, Scott Jackson, Susan McCouch (previous organizers of the Asilomar meeting in 2013), and Wilhelm Gruissem (Universitaetstrasse, Zurich, Switzerland) representing the Global Plant Council (http://globalplantcouncil.org).
