Marker-Assisted Selection in Wheat

Wheat is the world’s leading cereal grain crop, widely used due to its social and economic value. Wheat can grow in a wide range of climatic conditions but it is still vulnerable to a number of biotic and abiotic stresses. Recently, global warming has resulted in drastic changes in crop productivity in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. Among abiotic stresses, heat, drought, and salinity result in severe losses to wheat production. Similarly, biotic stresses (rusts, fusarium head blight, and powdery mildew) are among the major issues being faced by this crop. Therefore, improving tolerance to these stresses is a major challenge for plant breeders. For this purpose, conventional breeding approaches seem less useful due to their limited scope of success and their dependence on repeated selection cycles. To overcome barriers of conventional selection procedures, marker-assisted selection has become a preferred method to develop stress-tolerant genotypes.