Vol. 11, Issue 12 (2022)

Indehiscent or non-shattering trait is one of the evolutionary significant event of crop domestication. In wild taxa, dehiscence is vital for the propagation of progeny and their adaptation under diverse growth conditions. Dispersing seeds from the maternal parent is essential, as greater distances generally amplify offspring success due to the availability of less competitive environments. In crop plants however, indehiscence is an ideal trait, because dehiscent fruits make harvesting complicated and often lead to significant production losses. Therefore, shattering was likely to be one of the first character robustly selected against by early agriculturalists. Although a vital trait, not all seed crops have wholly indehiscent fruits. In order to get better traits such as disease resistance and stress tolerance, breeders are often mandatory to utilize wild crop material, which are prone to shattering. Consequently, there is often some degree of shattering in cultivated material, predominantly in minor crops. Crop losses at harvest due to shattering can be extensive, especially in some conventional crops with a history of hand harvest, and transition to machine harvesting may further increase these losses. Statistics on crop losses from seeds shattered at harvest have not been systematically assembled, so their extent is not well known.