Domestication yielded bigger crops often at the expense of plant microbiomes.
While domestication of plants has yielded bigger crops, the process has often had a negative effect on plant microbiomes, making domesticated plants more dependent on fertilizer and other soil amendments than their wild relatives.
In an effort to make crops more productive and sustainable, researchers recommend reintroduction of genes from the wild relatives of commercial crops that restore domesticated plants’ ability to interact with beneficial soil microbes.
Thousands of years ago, people harvested small wild plants for food. Eventually, they selectively cultivated the largest ones until the plump cereals, legumes, and fruit we know today evolved. But through millennia of human tending, many cultivated plants lost some ability to interact with soil microbes that provide necessary nutrients. This has made some domesticated plants more dependent on fertilizer, one of the world’s largest sources of nitrogen and phosphorous pollution and a product that consumes fossil fuels to produce.
“I was surprised how completely hidden these changes can be,” said Joel Sachs, a professor of biology at UC Riverside and senior author of a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “We’re so focused on above ground traits that we’ve been able to massively reshape plants while ignoring a suite of other characteristics and have inadvertently bred plants with degraded capacity to gain benefits from microbes.”
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