Genotyping Advancements for Mitigating Biotic Stress-Induced Damage in Wheat

Wheat being a staple food crop around the globe, is severely threatened by the diseases which results in huge crop losses. These diseases include wheat rust, spot blotch, fusarium head blight, powdery mildew, and barley yellow head virus. The pathogens of these diseases keep evolving and make them robust to cause pathogenesis in a wide range of temperatures and elevation. It is this resilience of these pathogens that helps them to spread widely in various geographical regions and cause epidemic in extreme cases. To prevent these losses, crop breeders keep on working on strategies for disease-resistant wheat varieties around the globe. To develop disease-resistant varieties in wheat, it is necessary to identify genomic regions (QTLs, Genes, Alleles) associated with disease resistance. Wild wheat relatives are a potential genomic resource of such genomic regions and have resistance against many present-day pathogens. These wild wheat relatives are used to introgress disease-resistant genes into elite wheat cultivars and the breeding material so developed is used for advanced molecular studies. Various genotyping techniques such as GBS, GWAS, DArT assay, and the next-generation sequencing techniques along with advanced bioinformatics tools utilize this material and identify the significant disease-resistant genomic regions. The RNA-Seq provides transcriptome analysis in addition to the sequencing data. This review presents a comprehensive account about wheat breeding for disease resistance, with utilization of the breeding material for genomic analysis using various genotyping and sequencing techniques to identify disease-resistant genomic regions.