The potential of integrative phenomics to harness underutilized crops for improving stress resilience

The current agricultural and food system faces diverse and increasing challenges. These include feeding an ever-growing human population, expected to reach about 10 billion by 2050 combined with societal disruption, and the need to cope with the impact of climate change (FAO, 2022). Given that future environmental conditions will limit crop productivity (Zhao et al., 2017; Cooper et al., 2021) and the limited potential to continually increase the performance of staple crops by conventional breeding (Hickey et al., 2019), there is an urgent need to transform agricultural systems. Central to this transformation is the application of alternative, accelerated, and sustainable approaches for the improvement and development of underutilized crops (Hickey et al., 2019). Modern breeding strategies for major crops have widely integrated novel technologies, such as advanced phenotyping or genome-wide interactions, and even epigenomics within “beyond the gene” strategies (Crisp et al., 2022) to speed up crop/genotype selection (Hickey et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2023). Deploying phenotyping at different scales has the potential to identify novel trait(s) components that can be targeted to accelerate crop improvement (Araus and Cairns, 2014; Großkinsky et al., 2015b; Zhao et al., 2019; Varshney et al., 2021). There is even greater potential for these technologies when used to improve underutilized crops and support the agricultural transformation, as underutilized crops typically lack a biased breeding/selection history, i.e., they often exhibit a high genetic diversity and potential, and are usually better adapted to challenging environments (Kumar et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2023). To illustrate the application of an integrative phenomics approach we discuss how combining multi-omics and advanced phenotyping is being applied to the underutilized oilseed crop Camelina sativa (camelina, gold-of-pleasure, false flax) to facilitate the generation of climate-smart crops for future agricultural systems.