Farm experts plan to track down wild relatives of crops such as rice or wheat with traits that make them able to resist global warming in a project costing perhaps $50 million, a leading expert said on Tuesday.
"The wild relatives of cultivated crops ... are largely uncollected or conserved in gene banks," said Cary Fowler, head of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust which co-manages a "doomsday" seed vault on an Arctic island north of Norway.
"We're at the early stages" of a project to identify and collect wild relatives of major crops to help breed more resilient varieties for a warming world, he told Reuters.
A wild potato plant in the Andes, for instance, might contain a previously unknown trait to resist droughts or heatwaves, floods or disease. Such traits could help breeders develop crops to bolster world food supplies in coming decades.
Wild plants "contain some of the extreme adaptations that are going to be ...