ABSTRACT
Wheat is the third most important cereal crop after maize and rice and serves as a staple food for the majority of the people worldwide. However, the productivity of wheat is often affected by different biotic and abiotic stresses worldwide. Therefore, efforts are continuously made to develop improved wheat cultivars with high nutritional quality and showing resistance against different biotic and abiotic stresses. Breeding for improved wheat cultivars using approaches like marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection (GS) require the information of alleles that are mainly involved in controlling different traits. The present chapter provides a detailed overview of available information on alleles in wheat for different genes/QTLs that have been identified for plant architecture, grain quality, and tolerance against abiotic stresses. The favorable alleles identified using interval mapping or linkage disequilibrium (LD)-based genome wide association studies (GWAS) can be potential targets for wheat improvement. Further, in this section, modern mutagenesis-based approaches (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes or TILLING, MutMap, SHOREmap, Mutmap+, and MutMap-Gap) for allele mining have been described with examples where these approaches have been used in wheat research. Overall, the present chapter will be useful resource of information for students as well as researchers working in the area of molecular breeding for improved wheat cultivars.
