Breeding wheat for resistance to Fusarium head blight in the Global North: China, USA, and Canada
Citation
Zhu, Z., Hao, Y., Mergoum, M., Bai, G., Humphreys, G., Cloutier, S., Xia, X., He, Z. (2019). Breeding wheat for resistance to Fusarium head blight in the Global North: China, USA, and Canada, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cj.2019.06.003
Plain language summary
Fusarium head blight (FHB) is an important fungal disease in wheat because it affects yield and grain quality. Heavily infected grain is unsuitable as human food or livestock feed. China, USA and Canada are among the top wheat producers of the world, and FHB is a major disease in all three countries. FHB resistance levels have increased over the years but progress has been slow because resistance is controlled by many genes with small effects. Here we describe the germplasm that has been used to achieve the level of resistance observed in our modern wheat varieties. Sources such as Sumai 3, Frontana, Mentana and Funo have played key roles and the pedigrees of several varieties with improved resistance to FHB reflects their extensive use in all three countries. Today, the chromosomal location of several major resistance genes has been determined and marker-assisted selection (MAS) is broadly used in breeding program to accelerate breeding for FHB resistance through the stacking of multiple genes. The first FHB resistance gene, fhb1, has been cloned, which permits the development of perfect markers for MAS and provides a step towards a better understanding of this complex plant-pathogen interaction.
Abstract
© 2019The objective of this paper is to review progress made in wheat breeding for Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistance in China, the United States of America (USA), and Canada. In China, numerous Chinese landraces possessing high levels of FHB resistance were grown before the 1950s. Later, pyramiding multiple sources of FHB resistance from introduced germplasm such as Mentana and Funo and locally adapted cultivars played a key role in combining satisfactory FHB resistance and high yield potential in commercial cultivars. Sumai 3, a Chinese spring wheat cultivar, became a major source of FHB resistance in the USA and Canada, and contributed to the release of more than 20 modern cultivars used for wheat production, including the leading hard spring wheat cultivars Alsen, Glenn, Barlow and SY Ingmar from North Dakota, Faller and Prosper from Minnesota, and AAC Brandon from Canada. Brazilian wheat cultivar Frontana, T. dicoccoides and other local germplasm provided additional sources of resistance. The FHB resistant cultivars mostly relied on stepwise accumulation of favorable alleles of both genes for FHB resistance and high yield, with marker-assisted selection being a valuable complement to phenotypic selection. With the Chinese Spring reference genome decoded and resistance gene Fhb1 now cloned, new genomic tools such as genomic selection and gene editing will be available to breeders, thus opening new possibilities for development of FHB resistant cultivars.