Ecological Genomics and the Development of Environmentally Resilient Crops

The world is likely to experience a series of increasingly severe food crises over the next century.  While these episodes will no doubt have many underlying causes, there is a general consensus about the need to maximize crop productivity, while minimizing resource use and environmental damage.  An especially promising approach, in our view, is the use of genomic tools to identify and introduce valuable alleles from the wild relatives of crops into elite cultivars.  We believe that this untapped variation in wild species has the greatest chance of providing large-scale, sustainable, and politically acceptable increases in crop productivity.  In this talk, we will (1) introduce two global projects that are focused on harnessing wild genetic diversity for agriculture, (2) describe some of the initial results from these projects, and (3) evaluate different ecological genomic approaches for identifying and validating agriculturally useful alleles in crop wild relatives, focusing on our work with wild and domesticated sunflowers.