July 06, 2023 | The Plant Genome |
Introduction: Researchers from CIMMYT (Mexico) and Mamoré Research and Innovation (UK) address a critical gap in wheat breeding research: the limited consideration of interacting biotic and abiotic stresses under climate change. Under a predicted 2ËšC global temperature increase, the timing and distribution of pests and diseases will shift, compounding the effects of drought and heat. Drawing on evidence from global wheat systems, the authors argue that most breeding programs still focus on single-stress tolerance, despite crops experiencing multiple, overlapping stresses in farmers’ fields. The study seeks to align large-scale breeding data with omics tools to design future wheat ideotypes that integrate resilience with high productivity by combining physiological, genetic, and systems perspectives to propose new directions for climate-resilient wheat improvement.
Key findings: The study shows that interacting biotic and abiotic stresses—including heat, drought, nutrient limitation, elevated COâ‚‚, and pests—reduce wheat yield and grain quality through non-linear physiological interactions that cannot be predicted from single-stress experiments. Combined heat and drought impair stomatal conductance, photosynthetic pigments, and source–sink balance, while elevated COâ‚‚ may increase biomass but often reduces grain quality by raising the C:N ratio and lowering protein content. These effects are frequently amplified when abiotic stresses co-occur with diseases or insect pressure. The review highlights that recent advances in high-throughput phenotyping and machine learning enable more efficient characterization of these complex responses. Field-based models can predict stomatal conductance with up to 97% accuracy and radiation use efficiency (RUE) with around 69% accuracy, reducing field data collection time by up to 40-fold. Such tools support earlier selection and more realistic evaluation under field-relevant stress combinations.
Genetically, the authors illustrate how solid-stemmed wheat markers offer a dual benefit by increasing resistance to wheat stem sawfly while improving lodging resistance, demonstrating opportunities to address multiple constraints with single breeding targets. To accelerate progress, the study advocates open-access platforms integrating genomics, metabolomics, and proteomics, allowing breeders—especially in low-resource programs—to simulate thousands of genotypes across environments. Overall, the authors argue that shifting from isolated trait improvement toward integrated “resilience packages” is essential for delivering climate-adapted wheat and supporting a second Green Revolution grounded in sustainability and farmer benefit.
