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BBC - Earth News - Wild food crop relatives to be 'rescued'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9273000/9273567.stm

Wild food crop relatives to be 'rescued'
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

Wild wheat (Image: Biodiversity International)
Like all domestic crops, wheat was bred from a wild plant

Scientists have announced a plan to collect and store the wild plant 
relatives of essential food crops, including wheat, rice, and potatoes.

The project, co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will 
collect and catalogue seeds from across the globe.

The aim is to safeguard valuable genetic traits that the wild plants 
contain, which could be bred into crops to make them more hardy and 
versatile.

This could help secure food supplies in the face of a changing climate.

        
We need to go back to the wild to find those relatives of our crops that 
can thrive in the climates of the future
Cary Fowler
Global Crop Diversity Trust

All of the plant material collected will be stored in seed banks in the 
long term, but much of it will also be used in "pre-breeding trials" to 
find out if the wild varieties could be used to combat diseases that are 
already threatening food production.

Dr Paul Smith is head of the Millennium Seed Bank at London's Royal 
Botanic Gardens, Kew, which is playing a key role in the project.

"There is a real sense of urgency about this," he told BBC News.

"For some of these species, we may just get this one bite of the cherry, 
because so many of them are already threatened [with extinction] in 
their natural habitats."
Seeds collected in Mali for the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Image: RBG Kew)
The project will collect and catalogue seeds from throughout the globe

The hope is that the wild relatives of food crops will help 
plant-breeders to "correct for", not only a changing climate, but plant 
diseases and loss of viable agricultural land.

Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust 
explained: "All our crops were originally developed from wild species - 
that's how farming began.

"But they were adapted from the plants best suited to the climates of 
the past.

"Climate change means we need to go back to the wild to find those 
relatives of our crops that can thrive in the climates of the future."

Wild saviours

Crops' wild relatives make up only a tiny fraction of the material 
contained in the world's gene banks.

But, according to Kew, their contribution to commercial agriculture 
alone is estimated at more than $100 billion per year.

In the 1970s, for example, an outbreak of grassy stunt virus, which 
prevents the rice plant from flowering and producing grain, decimated 
rice harvests across Asia.

Scientists from the International Rice Research Institute screened 
thousands of samples of wild and locally-cultivated rice plants looking 
for genetic resistance to the disease.

They found it in a wild relative, Oryza nivara, which grows in India. 
The gene has been incorporated into most new rice varieties since the 
discovery.