Ancient wheats role in sustainable wheat cultivation

Abstract Wheat, which originated around 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, is one of the most important crops worldwide providing around 20% of the total calories and protein of the human diet. During its long history across the whole world, several species and thousands of landraces have evolved making wheat the crop with more and diverse genetic resources available currently. The conservation, evaluation, and characterization of these genetic resources are basic in wheat sustainable cultivation because this genetic diversity could be key to face the challenges of agriculture nowadays. In this chapter, we describe an important part of these wheat genetic resources, the so-called ancient wheat. These are materials that were used by ancient civilizations but that know have a marginal use in agriculture and that in most of the cases are conserved in Germplasm Banks. Ancient wheat host huge variability that could be used in breeding programs to enhance the resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and the grain quality properties of the wheat grain, including its nutritional properties.