Poverty is pervasive in the Swat Valley, Pakistan. Most of the people survive by farming small landholdings. Many earn additional income by collecting and selling plant material for use in herbal medicine. This material is collected from wild populations but the people involved have little appreciation of the potential value of the plant material they collect and the long term impact their collecting has on local plant populations. In 2012, existing practices in collecting and trading high value minor crops from Swat District, Pakistan, were analyzed. The focus of the study was on the collection pattern of medicinal plants as an economic activity within Swat District and the likely destinations of these products in national or international markets. Local collectors/farmers and dealers were surveyed about their collection efforts, quantities collected, prices received, and resulting incomes. Herbal markets in major cities of Pakistan were surveyed for current market trends, domestic sources of supply, imports and exports of herbal material, price patterns, and market product-quality requirements. It was observed that wild collection is almost the only source of medicinal plant raw material in the country, with virtually no cultivation. Gathering is mostly done by women and children of nomadic Middle Hill tribes who earn supplementary income through this activity, with the plants then brought into the market by collectors who are usually local farmers. The individuals involved in gathering and collecting are largely untrained regarding the pre-harvest and post-harvest treatment of collected material. Most of the collected material is sold to local middlemen. After that, the trade pattern is complex and heterogeneous, involving many players. Pakistan exports of high value plants generate over US$10.5 million annually in 2012, with a substantial percentage of the supply coming from Swat District, but its market share has been declining. Reasons for the decline were identified as unreliable and often poor quality of the material supplied, length of the supply chain, and poor marketing strategies. These problems can be addressed by improving the knowledge of those at the start of the supply chain, improving linkages among all steps in the chain, and developing sustainable harvesting practices.

Malnutrition is mainly caused by iron and zinc micronutrient deficiencies affecting about half of the world's population across the globe. Biofortification of staple crops is the right approach to overcome malnutrition and enhance nutrient contents in the daily food of humans. This study aimed to evaluate the role of foliar application of iron and zinc in Trichoderma harzianum treated soil on various growth characteristics, quality, and yield of wheat varieties. Plants were examined in the absence/presence of T. harzianum, and iron and zinc micronutrients in both optimal and high-stress conditions. Although the symbiotic association of T. harzianum and common wheat is utilized as an effective approach for wheat improvement because of the dynamic growth promoting the ability of the fungus, this association was found tremendously effective in the presence of foliar feeding of micronutrients for the enhancement of various growth parameters and quality of wheat. The utilization of this approach positively increased various growth parameters including spike length, grain mass, biomass, harvest index, and photosynthetic pigments. The beneficial role of T. harzianum in combination with zinc and iron in stimulating plant growth and its positive impact on the intensities of high molecular weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) alleles make it an interesting approach for application in eco-friendly agricultural systems. Further, this study suggests a possible alternative way that does not merely enhances the wheat yield but also its quality through proper biofortification of iron and zinc to fulfill the daily needs of micronutrients in staple food.

Crop-wild introgressions have long been exploited without knowing the favorable recombination points. Synthetic hexaploid wheats are one of the most exploited genetic resources for bread wheat improvement. However, despite some QTL with major effects, much less is known about genome-wide patterns of introgressions and their effects on phenotypes. We used two genome-wide association approaches: SNP-GWAS and haplotype-GWAS to identify SNPs and haplotypes associated with productivity under water-limited conditions in a synthetic-derived wheat (SYN-DER) population. Haplotype-GWAS proved to be more powerful and identified 20 genomic regions associated with drought adaptability that did not overlap with SNP-GWAS. Since GWAS is biased to the phenotypes in the study and may fail to detect important genetic diversity during breeding, we used five complementary analytical approaches (t-test, Tajima9s D, nucleotide diversity (π), Fst, and EigenGWAS) to identify divergent selections in SYN-DER compared to modern bread wheat. These approaches consistently pinpointed 89 9selective sweeps9, out of which 30 selection loci were identified on D-genome. These key selections co-localized with important functional genes of adaptive traits such as TaElf3-D1 (1D) for earliness per se (Eps), TaCKX-D1 (3D), TaGS1a (6D) and TaGS-D1 (7D) for grain size, weight and morphology, TaCwi-D1 (5D) influencing drought tolerance, and Vrn-D3 (7D) for vernalisation. Furthermore, 55 SNPs and 23 haplotypes of agronomic and physiological importance such as grain yield, relative water content and thousand grain weight in SYN-DER, were among the top 5% of divergent selections contributed by synthetic hexaploid wheats. These divergent selections associated with improved agronomic performance carry new alleles that have been introduced to wheat. Our results demonstrated that GWAS and selective sweeps are powerful approaches for investigating favorable introgressions under strong selection pressure and the use of crop-wild hybridization to assist the improvement of wheat yield and productivity under moisture limiting environments.