Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) is a genetically diverse Andean crop that has earned special attention worldwide due to its nutritional and health benefits and its ability to adapt to contrasting environments, including nutrient-poor and saline soils and drought stressed marginal agroecosystems. Drought and salinity are the abiotic stresses most studied in quinoa; however, studies of other important stress factors, such as heat, cold, heavy metals, and UV-B light irradiance, are severely limited. In the last few decades, the incidence of abiotic stress has been accentuated by the increase in unpredictable weather patterns. Furthermore, stresses habitually occur as combinations of two or more. The goals of this review are to: (1) provide an in-depth description of the existing knowledge of quinoa’s tolerance to different abiotic stressors; (2) summarize quinoa’s physiological responses to these stressors; and (3) describe novel advances in molecular tools that can aid our understanding of the mechanisms underlying quinoa’s abiotic stress tolerance.

Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is a warm season grass with a growing season of 60-100 days. It is a highly nutritious cereal grain used for human consumption, bird seed, and/or ethanol production. Unique characteristics, such as drought and heat tolerance, make proso millet a promising alternative cash crop for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) region of the United States. Development of proso millet varieties adapted to dryland farming regions of the PNW could give growers a much-needed option for diversifying their predominantly wheat-based cropping systems. In this review, the agronomic characteristics of proso millet are discussed, with emphasis on growth habits and environmental requirements, place in prevailing crop rotations in the PNW, and nutritional and health benefits. The genetics of proso millet and the genomic resources available for breeding adapted varieties are also discussed. Last, challenges and opportunities of proso millet cultivation in the PNW are explored, including the potential for entering novel and regional markets.

In evolutionary plant breeding, crop populations with a high level of genetic diversity are subjected to the forces of natural selection. In a cycle of sowing and re-sowing seed from the plant population year after year, those plants favored under prevailing growing conditions are expected to contribute more seed to the next generation than plants with lower fitness. Thus, evolving crop populations have the capability of adapting to the conditions under which they are grown. Here we review the current state of research in evolutionary plant breeding and concentrate on the ability of evolving plant populations to deal with stressful, variable, and unpredictable environments. This resilience of evolving plant populations is seen as a major advantage under the predicted threats faced by agriculture such as global climate change. We have conducted an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of this breeding approach and suggest how its concept can be broadened and expanded. Given the current legal restrictions for realizing the potential of evolutionary plant breeding, we call for a change in legislation to allow evolving crop populations to enter agricultural practice on a larger scale.

Chenopodium quinoa is gaining global importance due to its excellent protein quality and tolerance of abiotic stresses. The last 60 years have seen major strides in the expansion of quinoa crop production and experimentation. Quinoa’s wide genetic diversity has led to its agronomic versatility and adaptation to different soil types, particularly saline soils, and environments with extremely variable conditions in terms of humidity, altitude and temperature. The potential of quinoa to contribute to global food security was recognized in the declaration of the International Year of Quinoa (IYQ, 2013). Promoting the use of improved homogeneous quinoa varieties standardized to comply with applicable norms on seeds or suited to intensified conventional agriculture farming systems may not generate the necessary resilience needed to respond to current and future global challenges. Maintaining and increasing quinoa biodiversity is imperative, as the dynamics of the global expansion of quinoa may constitute a threat to farmers if the spread is generated with a narrow genetic base. In this article, we propose that the method of evolutionary participatory breeding (EPB) could be a useful tool to develop new quinoa genetic material in cooperation with farmers. We introduce preliminary results on quinoa population development with farmers in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA. We conclude that a global collaborative network for quinoa (GCN-Quinoa) could be the baseline for participatory plant breeding programs originating in developing or developed countries to meet the needs of farmers across a diversity of agronomic systems and a wide range of physical environments.