Wild Relatives and Modern Plant Breeding Technologies

Abstract The world food demand is ever-increasing with the adjacent increase in world population. To balance out the demand and supply ratio, there is a huge pressure on global agriculture and related stakeholders for increased food production. Biotechnology is an advance knowledge which helps to study genetics, and develops technologies relevant to do interventions for crop yield improvements. Recently these technologies are termed “modern plant breeding technologies.” These technologies are applied to get desirable variation, to be used in developing genotypes with sustainable yield. Some of the significant technologies include zinc finger nucleases (ZFN), cisgenesis and intragenesis, oligonucleotide directed mutagenesis (ODM), RNA-dependent reverse breeding, DNA methylation (RdDM), molecular assisted breeding, and CRISPR/Cas9 technology. These techniques are made functional in the presence of OMICS that integrate bioinformatics with biotechnology and help in the generation of databases for future use. Crop wild relatives (CWRs) also play vital role as in certain cases they become principal resources of important trait determinants. These traits usually contribute to increased yield and quality of grain, resistance to biotic and abiotic stress factors, founding the basis of sustainable agriculture. These traits/genes also serve to help in the domestication of wild species which would otherwise be difficult to get benefit from in their native form. In this review article we aim to explore and develop literature on how modern plant breeding technologies can be applied on wild species to develop better crop genotypes for getting sustainable yields.