New Breeding Techniques for Sustainable Agriculture

In the scenario of a new agriculture, breeding techniques are asked to play an important role in order to make productive processes more sustainable under environmental, economic and social point of view. New crops need to be more efficient as for use of water and other resources, resilient and adaptable to different environments, able to produce healthy food products, but also other renewable material from their biomass to be used with an eco-logical approach in the different ambits of human activity. Plants will have to resist to new biotic and abiotic stresses where a drastic reduction of chemicals for their efficient production is expected. Also, plants will be more and more asked to fit new human needs such as the production of medicines and vaccines, or the detoxification of water and soils. The challenges facing breeders are highly demanding. However, breeding has always guided agriculture, improving performance and enabling the achievement of important goals, particularly during the “green revolution” age. The integration of different techniques and the development of both in vitro techniques and molecular strategies have accompanied the development of innovative breeding strategies during the last 50 years. New techniques have been utilized either directly for breeding or indirectly to obtain a more thorough understanding of the traits to be improved. Plant genetic resources have played a key role in this process. The use of New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) based on exhaustive knowledge of the genome of species and varieties will enable the development of new results that overcome the limitations of classical breeding techniques and their length and limiting the risks of the first generation of molecular breeding tools. In such a scenario, plant genetic resources are once again motivating breeders to achieve new results.