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Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Projections indicate that current plant breeding approaches will be unable to incorporate the global crop yields needed to deliver global food security. Apomixis is a disruptive innovation by which a plant produces clonal seeds capturing heterosis and gene combinations of elite phenotypes. Introduci...

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Autor principal: Hojsgaard, Diego
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7231277/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32290084
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes11040411
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author Hojsgaard, Diego
author_facet Hojsgaard, Diego
author_sort Hojsgaard, Diego
collection PubMed
description Projections indicate that current plant breeding approaches will be unable to incorporate the global crop yields needed to deliver global food security. Apomixis is a disruptive innovation by which a plant produces clonal seeds capturing heterosis and gene combinations of elite phenotypes. Introducing apomixis into hybrid cultivars is a game-changing development in the current plant breeding paradigm that will accelerate the generation of high-yield cultivars. However, apomixis is a developmentally complex and genetically multifaceted trait. The central problem behind current constraints to apomixis breeding is that the genomic configuration and molecular mechanism that initiate apomixis and guide the formation of a clonal seed are still unknown. Today, not a single explanation about the origin of apomixis offer full empirical coverage, and synthesizing apomixis by manipulating individual genes has failed or produced little success. Overall evidence suggests apomixis arise from a still unknown single event molecular mechanism with multigenic effects. Disentangling the genomic basis and complex genetics behind the emergence of apomixis in plants will require the use of novel experimental approaches benefiting from Next Generation Sequencing technologies and targeting not only reproductive genes, but also the epigenetic and genomic configurations associated with reproductive phenotypes in homoploid sexual and apomictic carriers. A comprehensive picture of most regulatory changes guiding apomixis emergence will be central for successfully installing apomixis into the target species by exploiting genetic modification techniques.
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spelling pubmed-72312772020-05-22 Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff Hojsgaard, Diego Genes (Basel) Opinion Projections indicate that current plant breeding approaches will be unable to incorporate the global crop yields needed to deliver global food security. Apomixis is a disruptive innovation by which a plant produces clonal seeds capturing heterosis and gene combinations of elite phenotypes. Introducing apomixis into hybrid cultivars is a game-changing development in the current plant breeding paradigm that will accelerate the generation of high-yield cultivars. However, apomixis is a developmentally complex and genetically multifaceted trait. The central problem behind current constraints to apomixis breeding is that the genomic configuration and molecular mechanism that initiate apomixis and guide the formation of a clonal seed are still unknown. Today, not a single explanation about the origin of apomixis offer full empirical coverage, and synthesizing apomixis by manipulating individual genes has failed or produced little success. Overall evidence suggests apomixis arise from a still unknown single event molecular mechanism with multigenic effects. Disentangling the genomic basis and complex genetics behind the emergence of apomixis in plants will require the use of novel experimental approaches benefiting from Next Generation Sequencing technologies and targeting not only reproductive genes, but also the epigenetic and genomic configurations associated with reproductive phenotypes in homoploid sexual and apomictic carriers. A comprehensive picture of most regulatory changes guiding apomixis emergence will be central for successfully installing apomixis into the target species by exploiting genetic modification techniques. MDPI 2020-04-10 /pmc/articles/PMC7231277/ /pubmed/32290084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes11040411 Text en © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Opinion
Hojsgaard, Diego
Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title_full Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title_fullStr Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title_full_unstemmed Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title_short Apomixis Technology: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
title_sort apomixis technology: separating the wheat from the chaff
topic Opinion
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7231277/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32290084
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes11040411
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