UTILIZING CROP GENETIC RESOURCES IN MODERN BREEDING TO ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE GOALS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

Crop improvement has been both a vital goal and a challenge for humans since the advent of modern cultivation.Farmers and breeders have long sought to produce higher yields of food; therefore, they initially focused on selecting the most productive plants.They always adopted high-yielding crops and discarded the other types, resulting in a loss of genetic diversity.Developing breeding programs and utilizing crop genetic resources enabled the achievement of sustainable goals in food production and the maintenance of increased genetic diversity in various gene banks.Modern plant breeding has introduced methods to generate diversity in crop germplasm, and these newly formed types can also be conserved alongside parent lines, landraces, or wild types.In this review, we focus on discussing the utilization and conservation of crop genetic resources through the application of modern breeding tools and conservation strategies.