Crop adaptation to climate change: An evolutionary perspective

Summary

This 2023 narrative review in Molecular Plant integrates evolutionary biology with contemporary crop breeding to address climate adaptation. The authors synthesise current strategies—including environment-matched variety selection, crop wild relative exploitation, and emerging technologies such as genomic selection and genome editing—whilst articulating how evolutionary theory and methods can enhance these approaches by detecting adaptive alleles, mitigating deleterious mutations, and resolving evolutionary trade-offs. The paper emphasises continued feedback between evolutionary and crop biology communities as essential for optimising climate-resilient crop development.

Regional applicability

The review's evolutionary framework and breeding strategies are broadly applicable to United Kingdom agriculture, particularly for cereal and temperate crop production. UK crop breeders and research institutions could leverage the discussed approaches—crop wild relatives, genomic tools, and speed breeding—to develop varieties suited to predicted climate scenarios; however, specific adaptation to UK soil types, growing seasons, and regulatory contexts (particularly regarding genome editing under UK post-Brexit policy) would require localised validation.

Key measures

Evolutionary mechanisms (population genetics, adaptive alleles, mutation accumulation); breeding strategies (genomic selection, speed breeding, genome editing); crop performance metrics under climate scenarios

Outcomes reported

The review synthesises evolutionary biology principles with crop breeding strategies for climate adaptation, examining methods to enhance environmental resilience including crop wild relatives, speed breeding, genomic selection, and genome editing. It discusses how evolutionary approaches can detect adaptive alleles, mitigate deleterious mutations, and inform crop improvement strategies under future climate scenarios.

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