Genetic Engineering of our plants

I'm going to ignore the climate change aspect of this article and focus on the fascinating science behind plant breeding, which narrows down the genetic diversity in order to yield more crops that taste better and are resistant to pests and drought, and their wild plant cousins who live out in the world and contain much more variety in their genes.

Like 'well-bred' dogs and the wild wolf, humans get the traits they want from the species by controlling who gets to mate with whom - which is different than genetically designing a dog in a petri dish. However, imagine taking a dog breed such as a poodle and deciding you want spots like a dalmation - a breeder would need multiple generations to make that possible. But once the genes were mapped out, a scientist in a lab could do it in much less time.

However, in both cases, you still need something to work with - be it a wild species of plant or the breeds of dogs that have the genetic material you want. A place that built it's work on the breeding of specialized chimera would need wild animals and breeds of chimera from which to draw from when creating it's ever more specialized population of creatures.

Vital Genetic Resources For Resisting Drought, Pests Jeopardised By Climate

Wild relatives of plants such as the potato and the peanut
are at risk of extinction, threatening a valuable source of genes that are
necessary to boost the ability of cultivated crops to resist pests and tolerate
drought, according to a new study released by scientists of the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The culprit is climate
change, the researchers said. According to the study, in the next 50 years as
many as 61 percent of the 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of the
108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct as the result of climate
change. Most of those that remained would be confined to much smaller areas,
further eroding their capacity to survive. The study also examined wild
relatives of cowpea, a nutritious legume farmed widely in Africa. It found that
only two of 48 species might disappear. However, the authors predict that most
wild cowpeas will decline in numbers because climatic changes will push them out
of many areas they currently inhabit. "Our results would indicate that the
survival of many species of crop wild relatives, not just wild potato, peanuts
and cowpea, are likely to be seriously threatened even with the most
conservative estimates regarding the magnitude of climate change," said the
study's lead author, Andy Jarvis, who is an agricultural geographer working at
two CGIAR-supported centers - the Colombia-based International Center for
Tropical Agriculture and Bioversity International, with headquarters in Rome.
"There is an urgent need to collect and store the seeds of wild relatives in
crop diversity collections before they disappear. At the moment, existing
collections are conserving only a fraction of the diversity of wild species that
are out there." Extinction of crop wild relatives threatens food production
because they contain genes for traits such as pest resistance and drought
tolerance, which plant breeders use to improve the performance of cultivated
varieties. The reliance on wild relatives to improve their cultivated cousins on
the farm is expected to intensify as climate change makes it too hot, too cold,
too wet or too dry for many existing crop varieties to continue producing at
their current levels. The results of the study were announced on International
Biodiversity Day, organized by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Jarvis and his colleagues looked specifically at the effects of climate change
on the three crops in Africa and South America. The scientists focused on the
two continents because this allowed them to consider how known populations of
wild plants would fare in a wide variety of growing conditions. They found the
impact of climate change is likely to be more pronounced in some species than in
others but that, in general, all three groups of species would suffer. Though
not apparent to the average consumer, the wild relatives of crops play an
important role in food production. All food crops originated from wild plants.
But when they were domesticated, their genetic variation was narrowed
significantly as farmers carefully selected plants with traits such as those
related to taste and appearance as well as to yield. When trouble arises on the
farm -attacks by pests or disease or, more recently, stressful growing
conditions caused by climate change - breeders tend to dip back into the gene
pool of the robust wild relatives in search of traits that will allow the
domesticated variety to overcome the threat. In recent years, genes available in
wild relatives have helped breeders develop new types of domesticated potatoes
that can fight devastating potato blight and new types of wheat more likely to
survive drought conditions. Wild relatives of the peanut have helped breeders
provide farmers with varieties that can survive a plant pest known as the root
knot nematode, and resist a disease called early leaf spot. In fact, according
to the report, more than half of new domesticated peanut varieties developed in
the last five years have incorporated traits from wild relatives. Cowpea wild
relatives are known to be a reservoir of genes that could confer resistance to
major insect pests. In the US alone, the value of the improved yield and quality
derived from wild species is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of
dollars a year. Jarvis said the vulnerability of a wild plant to climate change
can depend on its ability to adapt by, for example, extending its range as
warming in its native regions becomes too hot to handle. One reason wild peanut
plants appear to be so vulnerable to climate change is they are largely found in
flat lands and would have to migrate a long way to reach cooler climates, a
predicament exacerbated by the fact that peanuts bury their seeds underground, a
meter or less from the parent plant. That limits the speed at which seeds can
move into more favorable climates. By contrast, plants in mountainous locations
could theoretically survive by extending their range slightly up a slope, even
by only a few meters, to find cooler weather. What scientists must do, Jarvis
said, is identify which wild relatives are most likely to suffer from climate
change and give them priority for conservation. "The irony here is that plant
breeders will be relying on wild relatives more than ever as they work to
develop domesticated crops that can adapt to changing climate conditions," said
Annie Lane, the coordinator of a global project on crop wild relatives led by
Bioversity International. "Yet because of climate change, we could end up losing
a significant amount of these critical genetic resources at precisely the time
they are most needed to maintain agricultural production. Research that
identifies crop wild relatives threatened by climate change is part of a broader
CGIAR effort to anticipate and blunt the effects of global warming on
agriculture. In the local, national, and international policy arenas, CGIAR
researchers are generating innovative options to foster adaptation to climate
change. In addition, new research at CGIAR-supported centers focuses on
understanding the impacts of shifting climate patterns on natural resources,
such as water, fisheries, and forests, and on planning for improved management
of these resources to meet the needs of growing populations as the climate
changes.