Abstracto
- Worldwide genebanks hold phenotypic and genetic novelty useful to increase yield, crop adaptability, and agrobiodiversity (Tanksley and McCouch, 1997) while buffering crop genetic erosion (Khoury et al., 2021). However, new strategies for genebank utilization must be empowered in order to meet increasing global food demand (McCouch, 2013; Bohra et al., 2021) with crop alternatives resilient to climate change, sustainable to the environment and the biodiversity, and profitable for communities (Scherer et al., 2020). Therefore, in order to contribute filling this gap on genebank mining, this Research Topic compiles recent developments able to speed up crop improvement processes by leveraging high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping of crop wild relatives (CWR) and landraces (Singh et al., 2022). As discussed in the next section, the amassed works innovate different steps of genebank characterization, utilization, and allelic deployment, including germplasm identification, conservation, pre-breeding screening for genepool diversity and associated markers, and introgression breeding.
