Abstract
Improving crop yields arises as a solution to ensure food security in the future scenarios of a growing world population, changes in food consumption patterns, climate change, and limitations on resources allocated to agriculture. Defining traits that can be reliable cornerstones to yield improvement and understanding of their interaction and influence on yield formation is an important part of ensuring the success of breeding programs for high yields. Traits that can drive yield increases, such as light interception and conversion efficiency, as well as carbon assimilation and allocation, were intensively phenotyped in a double-haploid wheat mapping population grown under field conditions in the UK. Traits were analysed for their correlation to yield, genetic variation, and broad-sense heritability. Canopy cover and reflectance, biomass production, and allocation to stems and leaves, as well as flag leaf photosynthesis at a range of light levels measured pre- and post-anthesis correlated with plant productivity and contributed to explaining different strategies of wheat lines to attain high grain yields. This research mapped multiple traits related to light conversion into biomass. The findings highlight the need to phenotype traits throughout the growing season and support the approach of targeting photosynthesis and its components as traits for breeding high yielding wheat.
Highlights
Global food security is defined as a situation where all people at all times have access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food that provides the foundation for active and healthy lives [1]
Considering the high number of traits measured in the current study, when collinearity was high inside a group of traits, the selection of a few or a single trait that significantly correlated to the trait of interest and to the other group traits was selected for subsequent analysis to simplify the interpretation of the results
The results demonstrate the existence of different strategies to reach high yields and the need to phenotype field grown plants across the growing season
Summary
Global food security is defined as a situation where all people at all times have access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food that provides the foundation for active and healthy lives [1]. Ensuring food security in the near future is challenging, when considering the predicted scenarios of a growing world population [2], changes in food consumption patterns [3], extreme climatic events [4], and the need for the sustainable use of resources in agricultural activities [5]. Food production can be increased by: the expansion of croplands, intensification of land use, and increase in yields. Increasing yields might be responsible for around 77% of food production increases by 2050 [6]. In opposition to the required yield increases, a trend of stagnating yields has been observed for the main crops around the world [7]
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