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More needs to be done to ensure wild relatives of our key food crops are conserved for future generations, a study has said.
Researchers are concerned the genetic diversity of these vital plants are not being adequately stored in gene banks.
They say characteristics such as drought or heat resilience could be lost forever unless action is taken to preserve these genetic traits.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Plants.
An international team of scientists found that “the diversity of crop wild relatives is poorly represented in gene banks”.
In their assessment, they identified more than 70% of 1,036 wild relatives of 81 important food crops as a high priority for further collection.
They added that 95% were “insufficiently represented in regard to the fill range of geographic and ecological variation in their native distributions”.
. . . .
There are in excess of 1,700 institutional crop gene banks around the world, storing millions of samples, otherwise known as accessions,
Their main role is to preserve genetic material, primarily in the form of seeds and cuttings, and to make this material available for future research and breeding.
These crop gene bank play a pivotal role in global food security as the world faces the challenge of feeding a growing population, changes to regions’ climate and growing conditions.
Read full, original post: Go wild to protect food security, says study
