Wild Arachis Species, Valuable Germplasm Still to be Known

SEIJO, GUILLERMO; GARCÍA, ALEJANDRA VANINA; SAMOLUK SEBASTÍAN; CHALUP, LAURA; ORTIZ, ALEJANDRA MARCELA; GONZÁLEZ, ANA MARÍA; LAVIA, GRACIELA INÉS; ROBLEDO, GERMÁN

Saly

Conferencia; 10th International Conference of the Peanut Research Community on Advances in Arachis through Genomics and Biotechnology (AAGB-2018); 2018

The Peanut Foundation

Wild species related to agricultural crops can increase the adaptive capacity of agricultural systems around the world. They represent a large pool of genetic diversity from which to draw new allelic variation required in breeding programs. Arachis wild species are not the exception. New species are being discovered at a rate of almost one species a year since the Krapovickas and Gregory monograph was published in 1994. New characters were described for the genus, and the geographic distribution have been extended for most of the known species. Cytogenetic data has helped to arranged them in genome groups andgenomic information was generated for a few of them including the wild relatives that originated peanut. Arachis wild relatives probed to be extremely valuable in providing resistant alleles to peanut commercial varieties for diverse diseases. Unfortunately, wild Arachis species are a threatened resource and biological knowledge on them is still very limited. Examples are the assumptions that all Arachis species are autogamous and that all of them have the same reproductive ef4iciency. Moreover, the delimitation of species is still very dif4icult in many cases and the intraspeci4ic and intrapopulation variability, both morphological and genetic, is almost unknown. Here, we review and discuss (i) past and current efforts to generate knowledge on wild Arachis germplasm, (ii), what constraints continue to hinder increased use of wild species in breeding and (iii) what measures need to be taken to improve their protection, both in the wild and in genebanks.