Embracing plant plasticity or robustness as a means of ensuring food security
Saleh Alseekh, A. Klemmer, Jianbing Yan, Tingting Guo, Alisdair R. Fernie
Abstract
The dual challenges of global population explosion and environmental deterioration represent major hurdles for 21st Century agriculture culminating in an unprecedented demand for food security. In this Review, we revisit historical concepts of plasticity and canalization before integrating them with contemporary studies of genotype-environment interactions (G×E) that are currently being carried out at the genome-wide level. In doing so we address both fundamental questions regarding G×E and potential strategies to best secure yields in both current and future climate scenarios. Breeding environmental adaptive crop cultivars under the climate changing scenario is anything but easy. Here, the authors review the concepts of plasticity and canalization and their integration with contemporary studies of genotype-environmental interactions with the objective to facilitate crop breeding.