Leveraging wild relatives of wheat to enhance end-use quality in a changing climate

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a key staple food crop in the world, providing a vital source of dietary energy and nutrients to the human population. Approximately two-thirds of the wheat produced is dedicated to human consumption, while the remaining one-third serves as livestock feed. The end-use quality of wheat-based food products is determined by endosperm storage proteins (gluten properties), starch synthases (starch characteristics), puroindolines (grain hardness), phenolic compounds, and micronutrients. These components influence dough properties, nutritional quality, as well as various end-uses of wheat-based food products. A stable manifestation of these traits in a cultivar is an important breeding goal. Wild relatives of modern wheat encompassing both diploid and tetraploid wheat carry many useful traits related to nutritional and dough quality. These genetic resources can be leveraged as invaluable assets in securing the future of wheat cultivation. The advent of advanced sequencing technologies, modern breeding methodologies, and molecular techniques enables the effective utilization of these genomic resources for the precise prediction of quality attributes with remarkable accuracy and efficiency, thereby expediting crop improvement and cultivar development. This book chapter delves into the determinants of various end-use quality traits of wheat, their genetic control mechanisms, the use of genetics and genomics approaches for their improvement over the last 13 years, and future challenges and opportunities for wheat breeding in the face of a continuously changing climate scenario.