A Collaborative Effort for Mining Allelic Diversity Toward the Selection of Climate-Resilient Durum Wheat

Among the crops that feed mankind, durum wheat plays a crucial role in Mediterranean countries, where it is frequently grown under adverse environmental conditions. Until recently, limited efforts have been devoted to develop publicly available collections and platforms suitable for accurate dissection of the genetic basis of durum productivity and plasticity. To this end, the Expert Working Group in Durum Wheat Genomics and Breeding (EWG-DWGB) consortium has been organized within the Wheat Initiative (http://www.wheatinitiative.org/) to provide cutting-edge platforms and offer opportunities for the implementation of genomics-assisted breeding in durum wheat. Collaborative efforts involving many members of the durum wheat breeding community have contributed to the assembly of a high-density consensus map (≈ 30,000 markers, mainly SNPs), a large GWAS panel comprised of a broad range of tetraploid accessions (≈ 1,000) and the first de novo, high-quality assembly of the sequence of the durum wheat genome (cv. Svevo). Examples will be presented on how these resources are being deployed in order to (i) map and clone the genes and QTLs underpinning durum wheat productivity, and (ii) mine for beneficial alleles in ancestral wheat and landraces useful for mitigating the negative effects of climate change. While high-throughput phenotyping remains a major bottleneck for the dissection of the yield QTLome, particularly under adverse conditions, comprehensive knowledge of the wheat pangenome will accelerate the discovery of beneficial alleles/haplotypes toward the selection of climate-resilient durum wheat.