Wheat Improvement

This open-access textbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date guide for students and practitioners wishing to access in a single volume the key disciplines and principles of wheat breeding. Wheat is a cornerstone of food security: it is the most widely grown of any crop and provides 20% of all human calories and protein. The authorship of this book includes world class researchers and breeders whose expertise spans cutting-edge academic science all the way to impacts in farmers' fields. The book's themes and authors were selected to provide a didactic work that considers the background to wheat improvement, current mainstream breeding approaches, and translational research and avant garde technologies that enable new breakthroughs in science to impact productivity. While the volume provides an overview for professionals interested in wheat, many of the ideas and methods presented are equally relevant to small grain cereals and crop improvement in general. The book is affordable, and because it is open access, can be readily shared and translated -- in whole or in part -- to university classes, members of breeding teams (from directors to technicians), conference participants, extension agents and farmers. Given the challenges currently faced by academia, industry and national wheat programs to produce higher crop yields -- often with less inputs and under increasingly harsher climates -- this volume is a timely addition to their toolkit.

The Wheat Improvement, Management, and Utilization book covers some of the most recent research areas that touch on enhancement of wheat productivity. It is obvious that wheat is one of the major staple crops grown globally. This crop has widely been researched on considering that, for instance, it is afflicted by various abiotic and biotic stresses that limit its growth and productivity. Today?s goal of wheat improvement consistently is to develop varieties that are high yielding with good processing and technological qualities, well adapted and tolerant to prevailing biotic and abiotic stresses. Therefore, this is a valuable reference book on wheat improvement, agronomy, and end-use qualities, particularly for those who work in research organizations and higher academic institutions. Moreover, it provides an invaluable resource for readers interested in a quick review of trending topics in wheat.

World population is growing at an alarming rate and may exceed 9.7 billion by 2050, whereas agricultural productivity has been negatively affected due to yield limiting factors such as biotic and abiotic stresses as a result of global climate change. Wheat is a staple crop for ~20% of the world population and its yield needs be augmented correspondingly in order to satisfy the demands of our increasing world population. “Green revolution”, the introduction of semi-dwarf, high yielding wheat varieties along with improved agronomic management practices, gave rise to a substantial increase in wheat production and self-sufficiency in developing countries that include Mexico, India and other south Asian countries. Since the late 1980’s, however, wheat yield is at a standoff with little fluctuation. The current trend is thus insufficient to meet the demands of an increasing world population. Therefore, while conventional breeding has had a great impact on wheat yield, with climate change becoming a reality, newer molecular breeding and management tools are needed to meet the goal of improving wheat yield for the future. With the advance in our understanding of the wheat genome and more importantly, the role of environmental interactions on productivity, the idea of genomic selection has been proposed to select for multi-genic quantitative traits early in the breeding cycle. Accordingly genomic selection may remodel wheat breeding with gain that is predicted to be 3 to 5 times that of crossbreeding. Phenomics (high-throughput phenotyping) is another fairly recent advancement using contemporary sensors for wheat germplasm screening and as a selection tool. Lastly, CRISPR/Cas9 ribonucleoprotein mediated genome editing technology has been successfully utilized for efficient and specific genome editing of hexaploid bread wheat. In summary, there has been exciting progresses in the development of non-GM wheat plants resistant to biotic and abiotic stress and/or wheat with improved nutritional quality. We believe it is important to highlight these novel research accomplishments for a broader audience, with the hope that our readers will ultimately adopt these powerful technologies for crops improvement in order to meet the demands of an expanding world population.

This book is about the contribution to evolutionary theory and agricultural technology of one of humankind's most dramatic imitations of the evolu tionary process, namely crop domestication, as exemplified by the progenitor of wheat, Triticum dicoccoides. This species is a major model organism and it has been studied at the Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, since 1979. The domestication by humans of wild plants to cultivated ones during the last ten millennia is one of the best demonstrations of evolution. It is a process that has been condensed in time and advanced by artificial rather than natural selection. Plant and animal domestication revolutionized human cultural evolution and is the major factor underlying human civilization. A post-Pleistocene global rise in temperature following the ice age, i.e., climatic-environmental factors, may have induced the expansion of econom ically important thermophilous plants and in turn promoted complex forag ing and plant cultivation. The shift from foraging to steady production led to an incipient agriculture varying in time in various part of the world. In the Levant, agriculture developed out of an intensive specialized exploitation of plants and animals. Natufian sedentism, followed by rapid population growth and resource stress, induced by the expanding desert, coupled with available grinding technology, may have triggered plant domestication.