Omics-based interdisciplinarity is accelerating plant breeding

Abstract

Plant breeding is one of the oldest and most important activities accompanying human civilization. During the past thousand years, plant breeding has achieved three significant innovations, each of which derives from introgression of new theories or technologies. These innovations have significantly increased the food supply and allowed for population development. However, with population increases and resource shortages, the world is continuously facing the challenge of food security, which calls for next innovation in plant breeding. Recent technological advances in multiple disciplines have boosted the development of omics, which is accelerating plant breeding. Here, we review the recent advances in omics and discuss our understanding of how interdisciplinary researches will prompt new innovations in plant breeding.

Introduction

Food security has been one of the greatest priority considerations since the origin of humans. In turn, plant breeding, a major approach to increase the food supply, has become one of the oldest agricultural activities that parallels human civilization. Plant breeding has achieved three major technical innovations (artificial selection breeding, hybrid breeding, and molecular breeding) to date, with the fourth (optimal and precise design breeding) currently unfolding [1].

Approximately 10–12 thousand years ago, human ancestors learned to domesticate wild plants by selecting favorite lines based on their advantageous phenotypes such as loss of seed shattering from large numbers of progenitors [2]; thus, plant breeding started which constituted stage 1.0 (artificial selection breeding). This phenotype-based artificial selection breeding continued for thousands of years until the 19th century. In 1865, Mendel's laws were established [3]; thereafter, pedigree breeding based on hybridization was developed, with plant breeding entering stage 2.0 (hybrid breeding). In 1953, the structure of DNA was discovered, which caused life science to enter the molecular era [4], upon which new breeding approaches were developed, including marker-assisted selection (MAS) breeding [5] and genetically modified (GM) breeding [6]. These approaches switched plant breeding from sheer phenotype selection to a combination of genotype + phenotype selection, and plant breeding entered stage 3.0 (molecular breeding).

Innovations in plant breeding tremendously improved breeding efficiency and resulted in a greater food supply and in turn a growing population together the advances in farming mode and chemical fertilizers. For example, the wheat yield in the United Kingdom increased from 0.5 ton/hectare (ha) at the beginning of the 14th century to 1.8 ton/ha in the middle of the 19th century and then to 2.5 ton/ha in the middle of the 20th century (Figure 1, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). Consistent with this pattern, the world population grown from 0.4 to 1.3 billion, and then to 2.5 billion in these periods (Figure 1).

Nevertheless, the food supply remains far from our global needs [7]. Statistical data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show that moderate or severe food insecurity has been growing slowly in the last six years. It was estimated that in 2020 nearly 2.37 billion people did not have access to adequate food, accounting for approximately 30% of the worldwide population. Among them, approximately 768 million people experienced hunger [8]. Furthermore, the global population is continuously increasing and is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050 [9] and over 11 billion by 2100 (Figure 1). In addition, water shortages, climate change and extreme weather events make crop production increasingly more difficult. Hence, to feed the increasing population, there is a call for new innovation in plant breeding (stage 4.0) that can quickly combine superior alleles with optimal and precise design [1]. Summarizing previous achievements reveals that each innovation is the result of introduction of new theories or technologies (Figure 1). The development of new technologies, particularly in omics-based interdisciplinarity, is making Breeding 4.0 on the cusp.