Disease screening-assisted speed breeding in Winter Wheat

Abstract

Winter and facultative varieties cover 75Mha of the total wheat growing area of 220Mha. From these, up to 15Mha are located in developing countries, mainly in East Europe, North Africa, East and Central Asia. With the mandate to develop new varieties and cutting-edge research for the cold areas of the world, the International Winter Wheat Improvement Program (IWWIP) – a partnership between the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture, the Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) – was established in 1990. This program has been highly successful and now IWWIP varieties cover more than 2.3Mha in the developing world and are present in the pedigree of many varieties in the developed world. To increase genetic gain and continue to provide high yielding fit-for-purpose elite lines to the national programs new technologies need to be put in place. Speed breeding, a new technology to reduce the generation interval in wheat, has been proposed (Watson et al., 2018). Accelerating the time between crossing and the first yield trial can highly increase the genetic gain, especially in winter and facultative wheat, that due to its vernalization requirements can only produce one generation per year under field conditions. In the present study the proposed a protocol to accelerate the cycling of winter and facultative wheat showed that it is possible to reach 3 generations per year for most of the winter and facultative populations tested. Our results showed that growing the same F1 under field conditions in North Africa (Marchouch; Morocco) and West Asia (Terbol, Lebanon) would require 35.3% and 91.3% more time to reach maturity stage respectively as compared to the Speed Breeding treatment