Wheat Breeding for Disease Resistance: Review

Abstract

Breeding for disease resistance is a central focus of plant breeding programs, as any successful variety must have the complete package of high yield, disease resistance, agronomic performance, and end - use quality. Wheat breeding is focused on high yield, pathogen resistance and abiotic stress tolerance. Among diseases of wheat yellow rust, stem rust, and leaf rust are the most damaging diseases of wheat and other small grain cereals . Disease resistance in wheat breeding with one exception, the diseases of wheat that is important because of their effect on yield. Resistance to all diseases together can is important to avoid an unexpected loss in effectiveness of the resistance of a cu ltivar to a major disease. The genetic resistance to stem rust, leaf rust and yellow rust can be characterized as qualitative and quantitative resistances. Vertical resistance is specific to pathogen isolates based on single or very few genes. Race - specifi c is used to describe resistance that interacts differentially with pathogen races. Quantitative resistance is defined as resistance that varies in continuous way between the various phenotypes of the host population, from almost imperceptible to quite str ong. With the need to accelerate the development of improved varieties, genomics - assisted breeding is becoming an important tool in breeding programs. With marker - assisted selection, there has been success in breeding for disease resistance. Generally, bre eding programs have successfully implemented molecular markers to assist in the development of cultivars with stem, leaf and stripe rust resistance genes. When new rust resistance genes are to be deployed in wheat breeding programs, it unfortunately takes several years before the new sources of resistance will become available in commercial wheat cultivars. This is due to the long process involved in the establishment of pure breeding wheat lines. Biotechnology based techniques are available to accelerate t he breeding process via doubled haploid production.