Underutilized and Orphan Crops for Saline and Marginal Drylands: Mobilizing Genetic Resources for Climate-Resilient Food Systems

Saline soils, drylands and other marginal environments are expanding as climate change, water scarcity and land degradation advance, yet they remain under-served by mainstream crop research. This Research Topic focuses on how underutilized and orphan crops - and the genetic diversity conserved for them - can be mobilized to make these marginal lands productive. The goal is to connect plant genetic resources (genebank accessions, landraces, crop wild relatives) with modern characterization and breeding tools to identify and deploy adaptive traits for salinity, drought and poor soils. We aim to move from cataloguing diversity to using it, delivering resilient, nutritious crops that can be grown where staple cereals struggle. We especially welcome studies that turn conserved germplasm into usable pre-breeding material and cultivars for saline and dryland agroecosystems.Roughly a fifth of irrigated land is already salt-affected, and marginal drylands support hundreds of millions of people with few resilient crop options. Orphan and underutilized crops - millets, minor legumes, pseudocereals, halophytic and traditional species - often carry the salinity, heat and drought tolerance that elite staples lack, but their genetic resources are under-characterized and rarely enter breeding pipelines. Genebanks and biosaline research programs hold extensive collections whose adaptive potential is largely untapped. Advances in genomics, phenomics, genome editing and biosaline agronomy now make it feasible to characterize this diversity at scale and translate it into cultivars for marginal environments. Consolidating this genetic-resources-driven work for saline and dryland systems in one collection will accelerate the shift from conservation to climate-resilient food production.This Research Topic welcomes contributions that mobilize underutilized and orphan crop diversity for productive use of saline, dryland and other marginal agroecosystems. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:• Characterization of genebank accessions, landraces and crop wild relatives for salinity, drought and heat tolerance• Genomics, pangenomics and multi-omics of orphan and underutilized crops for marginal environments• Pre-breeding and introgression of adaptive alleles from genetic resources into usable material• Salinity and dryland tolerance mechanisms: physiology, root traits and water/nutrient-use efficiency• Genome editing and molecular breeding to accelerate resilience in underutilized crops• Biosaline agronomy and cropping systems for degraded and salt-affected lands• Nutritional value and biofortification of resilient orphan crops for food and nutritional security• High-throughput and field phenotyping adapted to marginal-environment germplasm evaluationWe welcome Original Research, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Methods, Perspectives and Opinion articles. Interdisciplinary studies that link conserved genetic resources to concrete breeding or field outcomes in saline and marginal environments are particularly encouraged. Topic editors: Gayacharan ., Muraleedhar S Aski, Ashish Balkrishna Rajurkar, HIFZUR RAHMAN Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84603/underutilized-and-orphan-crops-for-saline-and-marginal-drylands-mobilizing-genetic-resources-for-climate-resilient-food-systems