Modern agriculture's selective breeding of crops for particular requirements may now be a roadblock to further gains, prompting a trio of senior University of Queensland plant scientists to call for a new way forward.
Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos said that while plant breeders had delivered remarkable outcomes in maize, wheat, rice and soybean over the past century, each successive breakthrough was becoming harder to achieve.
"Even with the best efforts and rapid advances in genomics, computing and breeding technologies, genetic gains have been slowing," Ortiz-Barrientos said.
"We have produced crops that are more productive, more reliable and better suited to farming systems than ever before by focusing on harvestability, planting density, fertilizer use, irrigation management, disease resistance and grain quality.
"But it has channeled breeding efforts into increasingly narrow pathways, restricting which genetic combinations get tested and developed.
"The gene interactions have not disappeared from crops, but they sit outside the range of trait combinations that breeding programs can see, which makes crop genetics look simpler than it is.
"The combinations that have fallen by the wayside could hold part of the answer to improving future crop performance, but they've not been explored."
Ortiz-Barrientos and colleagues Mark Cooper and David Jordan have proposed a framework for overcoming the research roadblock.
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