Description and Characterization of Hellenic Wheat Germplasm for Agronomical and Seed Quality Parameters Using Phenotypical, Biochemical and Molecular Approaches

Bread Wheat Landraces Adaptability to Low-Input Agriculture

“…The absence of modern wheat cultivars specifically adapted to low-input or organic farming systems has highlighted the significance of conserving and exploiting landraces, which typically possess the adaptability to such agricultural practices [22]. Perhaps, landraces could provide a solution to this problem, which is also characterized by high tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, high yield stability, and average yield in low-input environments [4,[12][13][14]. The evaluation of agronomic and quality traits in the over-environmental evaluation can be considered a holistic methodology to estimate the productive potential of genotypes under prevailing climatic conditions, thus revealing their suitability for agricultural production.…”

“…Moreover, wheat landraces are considered an excellent source of variation in a breeding program for tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, seed quality characteristics, high yield stability in low-input/organic environments, and numerous other important traits that could help crops withstand the challenges arising from environmental change caused by climate change [4,[12][13][14]17,18,25,29,[42][43][44][45]. A promising landrace as a starting material for a bread wheat breeding program for yield and yield stability is "Xilokastro Lamias", which in the first growing season outperformed the rest of the landraces yielding 2.65 ton•ha −1 , while during the second growing season with a grain yield of 2.57 ton•ha −1 gave a similar yield to the two best commercial cultivars.…”

“…Wheat is one of the most important staple crops, which, in the last decade, has been cultivated worldwide on about 218.5 million hectares with an average annual production of 740 million tons and an average annual grain yield of 3.4 tons per hectare [1]. About 95% of world wheat production is bread wheat, while the remaining 5% is covered by durum wheat [2,3], which is of special interest in the Mediterranean basin [4,5]. Most of the wheat-growing areas are in the northern hemisphere of the earth.…”

“…According to Villa et al [11], landraces are defined as dynamic populations with the historical origin, distinct identity, and high variability, locally adapted and related to traditional cultivation systems, while according to Dwivedi et al [10] respond to current and emerging challenges for agriculture in stress environments. Wheat landraces have a high tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, high yield stability, and average yield in lowinput environments [4,[12][13][14] and have not undergone conscious selection by man [15,16].…”