Did Wheat Breeding Simultaneously Improve Grain Yield and Quality of Wheat Cultivars Releasing over the Past 20 Years in China?

Abstract

Grain yield and quality of wheat are both important components for food security. Great effort has been made in the genetic improvement of wheat grain yield in China. However, wheat grain quality (i.e., protein concentration and protein quality) has received much less attention and is often overlooked in efforts to improve grain yield. A timely summary of the recent process of wheat breeding for increasing yield and quality (which can be used to guide future breeding strategies) is essential but still lacking. This study evaluated the breeding efforts on grain yield and grain quality of 1908 wheat varieties in China over the past two decades, from 2001 to 2020. We found wheat yields show a 0.64–1.03% annual growth in the three-dominant wheat-growing regions in China. At the same time, there was no significant decrease in wheat protein concentration. Genetic yield potential was increased, and the genetic yield gap was closed. High grain yields and better quality can likely be achieved simultaneously by genomic selection in future wheat breeding.

Genetic gain of grain yield and quality in bread wheat cultivars representing 40 years of breeding in Morocco

“…The GG obtained was within the range reported in Spain (0.88% yr -1 from 1931 to 2000) (Sanchez-Garcia et al, 2013), and France (0.66% yr -1 from 1962 to 1988) (Brancourt-Hulmel et al, 2003). Other studies reported higher values of GG, ranging from 1.1% yr -1 in the United States Central Plains from 1903 to 2014 (Rife et al, 2019) to 1.17% yr -1 in Argentina from 1940 to 1999 (Lo Valvo et al, 2018) and 1.29% yr -1 in China during the period of 1950-2015 (Hu et al, 2022). J. N. Cobb et al (2019) reported that most public wheat breeding programs realized less than 1% of GG over the last 30 years.…”

“…The wheat yield exhibited a continuous positive increase: from 2.57 t ha -1 in 1980-1990 to 3.28 t ha -1 in 2013-2022. This means that the new released cultivars are a key for improving yields, especially that more than half of the test environments used for the analysis faced severe to moderate drought (Hu et al, 2022). The significant average annual genetic gain (GG) in GY since 1980 was found to be 21.4 kg yr -1 (0.75%/year), establishing the efficient contribution of breeding activities carried out in the last four decades towards improving the wheat yields in Morocco.…”

“…Most studies about public plant breeding programs efficiency reported genetic gains for wheat grain yield under 1% over the last 30 years (Cobb et al, 2019). For quality traits, few studies have been undertaken to assess their genetic progress and revealed mostly a nonsignificant gain or even a decline over time (Laidig et al, 2017;Hu et al, 2022).…”

Improving quality standards of purchase policy and sustainable staple food safety

“…Our research perspective differs from that of previous scholars. Most scholars have studied the key factors affecting staple food quality from the perspective of natural sciences (Randhe et al, 2009), such as breeding science (Hu et al, 2022), sowing methods (Pearsons et al, 2022;Zhu et al, 2022), production and inputs (Randhe et al, 2009;Ali and Akmal, 2022), growth environment (Kim and Kim, 2021;Zahra et al, 2023) and processing (Peng et al, 2022). Nevertheless, it is not enough to study staple food quality only from the physical and chemical properties.…”

The Effect of Freeze–Thaw Cycles on the Microscopic Properties of Dumpling Wrappers

“…China has made remarkable achievements in the breeding and production of wheat varieties in recent years [ 17 ], but the production of frozen dumplings is still in need of wheat flours of higher quality. Meanwhile, with the development of the economy and society, citizens’ eating habits have become more diversified, and multi-level requirements for pastas have occurred.…”