Bread wheat: a role model for plant domestication and breeding

Abstract

Background Bread wheat is one of the most important crops in the world. Its domestication coincides with the beginning of agriculture and since then, it has been constantly under selection by humans. Its breeding has followed millennia of cultivation, sometimes with unintended selection on adaptive traits, and later by applying intentional but empirical selective pressures. For more than one century, wheat breeding has been based on science, and has been constantly evolving due to on farm agronomy and breeding program improvements. The aim of this work is to briefly review wheat breeding, with emphasis on the current advances. Discussion Improving yield potential, resistance/tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and baking quality, have been priorities for breeding this cereal, however, new objectives are arising, such as biofortification enhancement. The narrow genetic diversity and complexity of its genome have hampered the breeding progress and the application of biotechnology. Old approaches, such as the introgression from relative species, mutagenesis, and hybrid breeding are strongly reappearing, motivated by an accumulation of knowledge and new technologies. A revolution has taken place regarding the use of molecular markers whereby thousands of plants can be routinely genotyped for thousands of loci. After 13 years, the wheat reference genome sequence and annotation has finally been completed, and is currently available to the scientific community. Transgenics, an unusual approach for wheat improvement, still represents a potential tool, however it is being replaced by gene editing, whose technology along with genomic selection, speed breeding, and high-throughput phenotyping make up the most recent frontiers for future wheat improvement. Final consideration Agriculture and plant breeding are constantly evolving, wheat has played a major role in these processes and will continue through decades to come.

Systematic trait based identification and characterization of Indian wheat varieties released during different time scales

“…Lower magnitude of genetic diversity among cultivated wheat varieties and grouping of durum genotypes with aestivum was also reported (Raj et al, 2017). Restricted genetic diversity between different species and within a single species is due to the nature of wheat as it is an allohexaploid developed by crosses between three highly interrelated diploid species, and the process of poplyploidization limits the genetic variability (Venske et al, 2019).…”

Is Gluten the Only Culprit for Non-Celiac Gluten/Wheat Sensitivity?

“…Agricultural techniques increased the abundance and availability of wheat, but it is only in the past 500 years that the gluten content of foods containing wheat has significantly increased. Modern hexaploid wheat cultivars have three different genomes (A, B and D) and evolved from the original diploid wheat, called einkorn ( Triticum monococcum ), through thousands of years of selective breeding and the development of tetraploid varieties [ 31 ] ( Figure 2 c). It has been posited that the genetic evolution, introducing new sequences into the wheat genome, could have potentially led to an increase in toxic and immunogenic epitopes responsible for the increased prevalence of CD [ 32 ] and, in general, of gluten-related disorders.…”

The Evolutionary Dynamics of a Novel Miniature Transposable Element in the Wheat Genome

“…Wheat is one of the most important crops in the world as it provides ~20% of the total calories consumed by humans. It also has a major role in the development of agriculture as it was one of first crops that were domesticated ( Appels et al., 2018 ; Venske et al., 2019 ). The origin of wheat dates back to ~5 million years ago, when three diploid ancestral species were diverged from a common progenitor.…”