Which wild plants could be used as a new source of crops?

Humanity gets most of its food from a handful of crops, while thousands of edible plants go largely unused. Genome editing now makes it possible to domesticate wild species in years rather than millennia, which raises the question of which ones are worth the effort.

Question

Which wild plant species could be developed into new crops, and how should candidates be chosen and domesticated? Candidates include wild relatives of existing crops, underused "orphan" crops and species never cultivated, valued for traits such as stress tolerance, nutritional quality or low input needs.

Background

The question is in the category "Plants, Climate Change and Food Production" of the 2023 list of 100 important questions facing plant science, chosen by four regional panels from 616 submitted questions [1]. It responds to the narrow species base of today's agriculture and to the need for crops suited to new climates and marginal land.

What is known

• At least 7,039 edible plant species are known, in striking contrast to the small handful of crops that provide most of humanity's calories and nutrients [2].
• Editing six loci linked to yield and productivity in wild Solanum pimpinellifolium produced lines with threefold larger and tenfold more numerous fruits than the wild parent, and 500% more lycopene than cultivated tomato [3].
• In groundcherry, an orphan crop, editing the counterparts of tomato domestication genes rapidly improved plant architecture, flower production and fruit size [4].
• For the wild allotetraploid rice Oryza alta, a transformation and genome-editing system and a high-quality genome allowed six agronomically important traits to be improved quickly, a possible route to a new staple cereal [5].

What would count as progress

No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:

• An open, ranked catalogue of candidate species scored on nutrition, stress tolerance, yield potential and available genetic tools, with the scoring method published so that others can reproduce or challenge it.
• Field trials comparing de novo domesticated or improved orphan lines with existing crops for yield, yield stability and nutritional quality across environments.
• Studies of what limits the adoption of specific candidates, such as regulation, markets and cultivation knowledge.

References

1. Armstrong, E. M. et al. (2023). One hundred important questions facing plant science: an international perspective. New Phytologist 238(2), 470–481.
2. Ulian, T. et al. (2020). Unlocking plant resources to support food security and promote sustainable agriculture. Plants, People, Planet 2(5), 421–445.
3. Zsögön, A. et al. (2018). De novo domestication of wild tomato using genome editing. Nature Biotechnology 36(12), 1211–1216.
4. Lemmon, Z. H. et al. (2018). Rapid improvement of domestication traits in an orphan crop by genome editing. Nature Plants 4(10), 766–770.
5. Yu, H. et al. (2021). A route to de novo domestication of wild allotetraploid rice. Cell 184(5), 1156–1170.

Source

Imported from One hundred important questions facing plant science, question 56, curated by Armstrong et al. Listed as open in the source (2023) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.