Wheat Disease and Insect Management through Host Plant Resistance.

Wheat Fusarium head blight resistance research is a very good example for innovative approaches and technologies in wheat management. It started in the early of 1990’s for the China-US collaborative research. Many wheat germplasm lines and cultivars were introduced from China and screened for FHB resistances in the greenhouse and field. The spring wheat cultivar from China, Sumai 3 was the one that have been used intensively in many spring wheat breeding programs in the US. However, in the soft red winter wheat region, the FHB resistances from locally adapted cultivars are dominant. In the hard red winter wheat regions of the Great Plains in the US, many diseases including rusts, viral diseases and their vectors including greenbug, wheat curl mite, hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid, can limit wheat productions. Many wheat production areas in China have similar climate conditions and face the same stresses. More than 85% of wheat is winter wheat in China. The new technologies in wheat genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics will provide many opportunities for future research in host plant resistances for those major stresses.