Marker Assisted Genotype by Environment Models for Adapting Wheat to Climate Change

Although the history of agriculture and plant breeding shows that many crops, especially wheat, can be adapted to an incredible range of environments, environmental, especially climatic, variability has always posed problems to geneticists and breeders because it generates genotype by environment interactions. With climate change a reality upon us, the challenge will be for breeding to keep pace with trends in temperature and precipitation. Using two case studies in France, we will illustrate how available tools, namely molecular markers and models of genotype by environment (GxE) interaction, can be leveraged to face this challenge. We will illustrate how a marker based ecophysiological model of wheat phenology may help in designing future wheat varieties with adapted phenologies for the future. We will also show how a genomic prediction model integrating a GxE component may be used to simulate genotype performance in a wider range of climate scenarios than what is permitted by field experiments, and how these results might be analyzed to characterize genotypes for robustness to certain stresses and to climatic variability in general.