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A wild hunt for food crop genes
Why is it in news?
- Scientists have been on a global search for the wild relatives of our food crops, hoping to bolster their defences against disease and climate change, a study said.
More in news
- Domestication of wild plants: Humans have domesticated wild plants for some 10,000 years to provide food but in doing so they have bred out many of their natural defences, leaving them-and us-potentially exposed.
- More about the study
(1) The study is being carried out under the Crop Wild Relatives project at the Kew Gardens Millennium Seed Bank, which has so far distributed nearly 3,300 samples of 165 species.
(2) Collection of seeds: By going back to the original source plants of some 28 foods — for example, of rice, potatoes, oats, groundnuts — researchers collected as wide a variety of seeds as possible in 25 countries to fill in the gaps in existing gene banks.
Source
The Hindu