Pollinator‐assisted plant phenotyping, selection, and breeding for crop resilience to abiotic stresses

• DOI: 10.1111/tpj.16748
• Publication Date: 2024-04-06T13:09:51Z
• Authors: Francisco Pérez‐A...; Monica Borghi; Juan José Guerrero; Antonio R. Jiménez; José M. Jiménez‐G...; Alisdair R. Fernie; Ignasi Bartomeus
• Keywords: Pollinators preferences; Crops, Agricultural; Genotype; Natural selection; Insect tracking; Crop redomestication; Flowers; Plant Breeding; Phenotype; Stress, Physiological; Source‐sink; Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris); Climate change; Ecosystem services; Animals; Plant resilience; Pollination

SUMMARY Food security is threatened by climate change, with heat and drought being the main stresses affecting crop physiology ecosystem services, such as plant–pollinator interactions. We hypothesize that tracking ranking pollinators' preferences for flowers under environmental pressure could be used a marker of plant quality agricultural breeding to increase stress tolerance. Despite increasing relevance most sensitive organs, phenotyping platforms aim at identifying traits resilience assessing physiological status through remote sensing‐assisted vegetative indexes, but find strong bottlenecks in quantifying flower accurate genotype‐to‐phenotype prediction. However, transport photoassimilates from leaves (sources) (sinks) reduced low‐resilient plants, are better indicators than well‐being. Indeed, chemical composition amount pollen nectar produce, which ultimately serve food resources pollinators, change response cues. Therefore, measure functional source‐to‐sink relationships decisions. To achieve this challenging goal, we propose develop pollinator‐assisted selection platform automated quantification Genotype × Environment Pollinator interactions an insect geo‐positioning system. Pollinator‐assisted can validated metabolic, transcriptomic, ionomic traits, mapping candidate genes, linking floral leaf pollinator preferences, resilience, productivity. This radical new approach current paradigm paths redomestication assisted ecological