Wheat leaf rust caused by Puccinia triticina is very destructive to the susceptible wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars. Breeding for resistance is still the most economic and desirable method for controlling the disease. The objective of this investigation was to: 1) study the nature of inheritance of leaf rust disease resistance as well as grain yield and its related characters, 2) detect leaf rust resistant genes in the studied cultivars under field condition, 3) evaluate using Sequence Characterized Amplified Regions technique (SCAR) for the leaf rust resistance gene Lr37 and 4) use SCAR as a tool for selecting and pyramiding different Lr's resistance genes in Egyptian cultivars. Combining ability effects were estimated using line × tester matting design. Four high yielding cultivars Giza 168, Sakha 93, Sakha 94 and Gemmeiza 9 as females ( lines) and four leaf rust monogenic lines. i.e., Lr10, Lr19, Lr37 and Lr39 as males (testers). Broad sense heritability (h 2 b) was computed. The Chi-square test (χ 2 ) was used to test the significant of difference between observed and expected ratios in F2 populations for leaf rust reaction. PCR reaction for SCAR primers was applied. The study included four characters; plant height (PH), leaf rust resistance as average coefficient of infection (ACI), number of spikes per plant (S/P) and grain yield per plant (GY/P). The obtained results can be summarized as follow; Sakha 93 was the best general combiner for PH and Sakha 94 for leaf rust resistance and GY/P. The best combinations for PH were Giza 168 × Lr39, Sakha93 × Lr19 and Sakha 94 × Lr37; for leaf rust resistance were Sakha 93 × Lr37, Sakha 93 × Lr39, Sakha 94 × Lr10 and Sakha94 × Lr19 and for yield and its components were Sakha 94 × Lr37 and Gemmeiza 9 × Lr19. Giza 168, Sakha 94 and Gemmeiza 9 had one or two genes conferring resistance to leaf rust. In addition, Lr39 leaf rust resistant gene was present in Giza 168 and Sakha 94. The laboratory studies showed that, the SCAR marker has the potential of detecting Lr37 in the studied Egyptian cultivars as well as the monogenic lines. Moreover, Giza 168, line 1 and line 3 had the leaf rust resistance gene Lr37.

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The new promising durum wheat cultivar Bani Suef 6 was newly released from Wheat Research Department, Field Crops Research Institute, ARC, Egypt. Bani Suef6 has been selected from CIMMYT materials grown at Sids Agricultural Research Station. Yield evaluation was performed through 31 experiments conducted at different levels of preliminary and advanced yield trials during the three successive growing seasons from 2004/2005 to 2006/2007. The results revealed that the new durum wheat cultivar Bani Suef6 has high yielding ability compared with commercial durum wheat cultivars. Moreover, stability analysis for grain yield showed that Bani Suef 6 has better stability parameters in the three main regions for durum wheat cultivated in Egypt, i.e., Middle Egypt, Upper Egypt and Out Valley. Also, the results of rust diseases reactions cleared that Bani Suef 6 has high resistance to leaf and stem rust diseases. Studies on yield components of Bani Suef 6 revealed that the new cultivar had significantly surpassed the check durum cultivars in number of spikes/m 2 , number of kernels/spike and higher 1000-kernel weight confirming the contribution of yield components in improving grain yield of the new durum cultivar Bani Suef 6. Studies on number of days to heading revealed that Bani Suef 6 recorded 98.7 days to heading which was earlier than some durum cultivars and almost equal to the average of all cultivars (99.1 days). Similarity, Bani Suef 6 was the earliest in physiological maturity (147.7 days) while other durum checks ranged from 149.0 to 150.8 with an average of 149.7 days. Bani Suef 6 recorded the lowest plant height (101.0 cm vs. 106.0 cm for the average of other cultivars). Physical and chemical analyses of durum wheat grains showed that the new cultivar Bani Suef 6 had a higher score over the average of the other four durum cultivars in hectoliter (83.1 vs. 82), Semolina (77.0 vs. 76.6%), protein (12.9 vs. 12.3%), wet gluten (29.6 vs. 28.4%) and dry gluten (