Development of Rural Landraces Through Mutation Breeding Approaches

Modern agricultural operations employ crop improvement methods that have paradoxically diminished the genetic diversity of crop plants. Traditional crop development processes aimed at managing biotic and abiotic stresses often employ common genes, alleles, or parent lines, rendering them more susceptible to rapid failure. Contrarily, landraces of customary agricultural plants have consistently demonstrated resilience against unfavourable climatic conditions despite being limited to marginal areas. These landraces possess a substantial genetic potential that can be harnessed in pre-breeding or other plant breeding activities. Efforts are ongoing to preserve this genetic potential through on-farm, in-situ, or ex-situ conservation. Gene introgression into new varieties from landraces has shown promise. This is achieved through genomic selection based on the phenotypic and/or genotypic screening of desired traits. Modern molecular plant breeding tools such as QTL mapping and marker-assisted selection, alongside biotechnological tools for gene pyramiding, can be employed to prepare parental lines for crosses or to directly introduce them into a desired cultivar. Mutation breeding, an emerging tool in plant breeding, has shown considerable promise. It is now used with high throughput screening and/or genomic selection to identify beneficial heritable changes at the genome level with precision and speed. Given that rural landraces are reservoirs of extensive genetic variability, tools like mutation breeding can facilitate more significant deviations among the parentage of newly developed crops. Genetic homogeneity among crops poses an inherent risk when exposed to pertinent biotic or abiotic factors, potentially leading to total crop failure. Thus, the ultimate aim of new-age plant breeding programs is strategically exploiting and utilizing landraces. This is achieved by extending plant breeding activities, and leveraging new generation technology to expedite the process with greater precision, thereby enhancing the development of rural landraces through mutation breeding.