Physiological, Molecular, and Genetic Perspectives of Wheat Improvement

World population is growing at an alarming rate and may exceed 9.7  billion by 2050, whereas agricultural productivity has been negatively  affected due to yield limiting factors such as biotic and abiotic  stresses as a result of global climate change. Wheat is a staple crop  for ~20% of the world population and its yield needs be augmented  correspondingly in order to satisfy the demands of our increasing world  population. “Green revolution”, the introduction of semi-dwarf, high  yielding wheat varieties along with improved agronomic management  practices, gave rise to a substantial increase in wheat production and  self-sufficiency in developing countries that include Mexico, India and  other south Asian countries. Since the late 1980’s, however, wheat yield  is at a standoff with little fluctuation. The current trend is thus  insufficient to meet the demands of an increasing world population.  Therefore, while conventional breeding has had a great impact on wheat  yield, with climate change becoming a reality, newer molecular breeding  and management tools are needed to meet the goal of improving wheat  yield for the future. With the advance in our understanding of the wheat  genome and more importantly, the role of environmental interactions on  productivity, the idea of genomic selection has been proposed to select  for multi-genic quantitative traits early in the breeding cycle.  Accordingly genomic selection may remodel wheat breeding with gain that  is predicted to be 3 to 5 times that of crossbreeding. Phenomics  (high-throughput phenotyping) is another fairly recent advancement using  contemporary sensors for wheat germplasm screening and as a selection  tool. Lastly, CRISPR/Cas9 ribonucleoprotein mediated genome editing  technology has been successfully utilized for efficient and specific  genome editing of hexaploid bread wheat. In summary, there has been  exciting progresses in the development of non-GM wheat plants resistant  to biotic and abiotic stress and/or wheat with improved nutritional  quality. We believe it is important to highlight these novel research  accomplishments for a broader audience, with the hope that our readers  will ultimately adopt these powerful technologies for crops improvement  in order to meet the demands of an expanding world population