Next Generation Wheat Breeding in the Post Sequence Era.

Plant breeding has and continues to evolve by taking advantage of advances in many fields (biology, genetics, genomics, host-parasite/climate interactions, statistics,).  Central to its advancement is asking the right questions and choosing the right technologies to efficiently improve plants that sustain life.  As the technology succeeds, new challenges emerge or become relatively more important, but the fundamental questions remain on how to understand the phenotype, and the environment and genetics that shape it.  With crop sequences becoming known, plant breeders must reevaluate where their limitations are and use those emerging technologies to overcome these limitations.  Understanding our environment and being better able to predict the phenotype with limited replication in time and space or when a trial fails is critical to the continuous improvement expected in plant breeding, especially in wheat.  However, modern wheat breeding has been and will continue to be concept driven.  The questions will include should wheat become a hybrid in some of its diverse growing regions, how to develop stable disease and insect resistant crops, how to increase nitrogen and water use efficiency, and how to improve consistency in grain yield and enhance grain quality.  The post sequence era will be no different than the previous “post” eras when the principles of genetics, statistics, plant physiology, pathogenesis and pestilence were first being understood.  However, wheat breeders will have much better tools and understanding to meet these challenges.  These tools will require teams and the soft skills of building teams will become more critical.