Genetic diversity for developing climate-resilient wheats to achieve food security goals

To feed more than 9 billion people by 2050, increased food production must be accomplished with reduced agricultural inputs in the face of climate change. Wild relatives of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) possess many potentially valuable traits for improvement of its yield, quality plus tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses. To enhance the genetic gains and make agricultural systems climate-resilient, an integrated approach is urgently needed, which entails the use of high-throughput (i.e., genomic and phenomic) technologies and development of innovative breeding strategies to rapidly introgress favorable alleles from the reservoir of genetic diversity prevalent in the wild wheat relatives into modern wheat. This review covers successful gene transfers from wild relatives and use of the available genetic diversity to overcome yield barriers and improve modern wheat cultivars. We summarize the most recent advances in genomic and phenomic approaches and discuss the importance of exploiting the latest reference genomes of wheat and its wild relatives, computational resources and genome-editing technologies (such as CRISPR/Cas9) to enhance the efficiency of plant breeding, thus introducing desired alien genes without deleterious effects. We envision that the integration of various technologies will be critical in improving and stabilizing wheat yields and in meeting the future food demands of the growing human population, particularly in the face of climate change and the wheat production goals set for 2050 food security.