Domestication of newly evolved hexaploid wheat—A journey of wild grass to cultivated wheat

Abstract

Domestication of wheat started with the dawn of human civilization. Since then, improvement in various traits including resistance to diseases, insect pests, saline and drought stresses, grain yield, and quality were improved through selections by early farmers and then planned hybridization after the discovery of Mendel’s laws. In the 1950s, genetic variability was created using mutagens followed by the selection of superior mutants. Over the last 3 decades, research was focused on developing superior hybrids, initiating marker-assisted selection and targeted breeding, and developing genetically modified wheat to improve the grain yield, tolerance to drought, salinity, terminal heat and herbicide, and nutritive quality. Acceptability of genetically modified wheat by the end-user remained a major hurdle in releasing into the environment. Since the beginning of the 21st century, changing environmental conditions proved detrimental to achieving sustainability in wheat production particularly in developing countries. It is suggested that high-tech phenotyping assays and genomic procedures together with speed breeding procedures will be instrumental in achieving food security beyond 2050.

Pollen viability-based heat susceptibility index (HSIpv): A useful selection criterion for heat-tolerant genotypes in wheat

“…To show the trend of HSI pv over the period of time, a violin plot was made using Jamovi 2.3.18 ( R Core Team, 2021 ; The jamovi project, 2022 ). The panel of 200 genotypes was categorized in pre-green revolution, post-green revolution, and modern wheat varieties following Gohar et al. (2022) .…”

Climate Change—The Rise of Climate-Resilient Crops

“…This success is attributed to the development of new technologies. Advanced genomic tools can now be employed to support artificial selections [ 58 , 65 , 66 ].…”

Wheat quality: A review on chemical composition, nutritional attributes, grain anatomy, types, classification, and function of seed storage proteins in bread making quality

“…The haploid content of DNA regarding wheat's six sets of chromosomes (Triticum aestivum L. em Thell, 2n = 42, AABBDD) is almost 1.7 × 1,010 base pair. It is approximately 100× greater than that of the genome of Arabidopsis, 40× that of rice, and nearly 6× that of maize (20,26). The majority of the DNA sequence of bread wheat is derived from polyploidy, with substantial duplication, in which, repetitive DNA sequences make up 80% of the entire genome (27,28).…”