Abstract:

Orphan crops, also known as minor crops, smart foods, and superfoods, have attracted great attention recently because of their unique ability to grow in resource-poor marginal lands, and under harsh environmental conditions without any intensive agricultural care. These crops possess inherent tolerance against different abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, cold, and heat. Recent advancements in genomic resources and high-throughput phenotyping platforms have provided opportunities to explore the untapped potential of orphan crops to identify novel gene source(s) and mechanism(s) for developing abiotic stress-tolerant crops. The paper emphasizes the importance of leveraging genomic tools and high-throughput phenotyping to unlock the genetic potential of these crops. The review also discusses global initiatives aimed at improving orphan crops and integrating them into agriculture to ensure food security in the face of climate change.

Conclusions:

Abiotic stresses pose a significant challenge in ensuring global food security and are expected to worsen with the adverse climate conditions. Deciphering the complexities of abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms is a huge task and requires good model crops for investigation. Advancements in genomic technologies have made it possible to sequence and analyze a large number of orphan crops, which are known for their abiotic stress tolerance potential. Various global and national initiatives have generated large genomic datasets, which have provided useful insights into the mechanistic understanding of abiotic stress tolerance. Translation of the knowledge gained from orphan crops to some of the major crops, such as wheat, rice, and maize, is now possible due to advanced genomics-assisted breeding techniques, as well as gene-editing techniques like CRISPR/Cas. Moreover, the development of advanced high-throughput phenomics platforms has facilitated the characterization of large germplasm and mapping populations for association mapping (GWAS). Using a combination of these techniques, it is quite possible to develop new, improved varieties of both orphan and major crops, which would be superior in productivity as well as possess abiotic stress tolerance. Eventually, it will aid in ensuring global food security in this era of global climate change.