ABSTRACT
Increasing crop production to feed the rapidly growing human population in a sustainable manner while maintaining healthy ecosystems under changing climatic conditions remains one of the greatest challenges of our time (Godfray et al. 2010, Wheeler and von Braun 2013). Crop cultivars with increased tolerance to heat, drought, and salinity, and resistance to emerging pests and diseases are urgently needed as a means to adapt and sustain agricultural productivity under changing climatic conditions and mitigate the negative effects of climate change. Although predictions of global climate models differ substantially (IPCC 2013), they largely converge in projections of increase in temperature and frequency of droughts in dry-lands, one of the most climate-change-sensitive land systems of the world. Drylands cover over 40% of the land surface and are home to over 2.5 billion (mostly poor) people. Improvement of crops to meet climate-change-imposed challenges in drylands will depend largely on the identification and effective utilization of genes related to climate-change-adaptive traits in plant genomes. Most genetic variants related to these traits are likely present in germplasm in genebanks or in wild relatives of crop plants. Discovering new and useful alleles of these genes in over seven 216million accessions of crop germplasm stored in more than 1700 national and international genebanks remains a challenge.
