Breeding Wheat for Biotic Stress Resistance: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects

Wheat (T. aestivum) is one of the key food grain crops and is a prominent source of calories and proteins globally. In addition to mushrooming population and rising abiotic stresses in this ongoing climate change era, biotic stresses pose a great threat to wheat production over the globe. Fungal diseases such as rusts, mildew, along with pests like aphid, hinder the potential yield performance of the elite wheat cultivars to a huge extent. The complex nature of plant-parasite interactions is shown to be the decisive factor for the ultimate resistance expression in wheat. However, the advancement of molecular genetics and biotechnology enabled the replacement of the tedious, time and resource consuming cytogenetic analyses of locating APR and ASR genes using molecular mapping techniques. Continuous efforts have been made to mine resistance genes from diverse genetic resources such as wild relatives for combating these diseases and pests, which are repositories of R genes. Additionally, they offer a promising source of genetic variation to be introgressed and exploited for imparting biotic stress tolerance in cultivated wheat. Though just a handful of R-genes are cloned and molecularly characterized in wheat so far, more than 350 resistance genes for various diseases have been identified and successfully introgressed into elite varieties around the globe. Modern genomics and phenomic approaches coupled with next-generation sequencing techniques have facilitated the fine-mapping as well as marker aided selection of resistance genes for biotic stress resistance wheat breeding

Nutritional and quality analysis of quinoa seed flour fortified wheat biscuits

Improvisation towards a healthy lifestyle is a necessity of today. Quinoa is a pseudo cereal and it’s seed is rich in essential amino acids such as methionine, threonine and lysine which are limiting in most other cereals. It also contains large amounts of minerals like calcium, iron, zinc and copper. Hence, it can be used in preparation of fortified products. The influence of fortification of wheat flour with quinoa seed flour in different ratios (90:10), (80:20), (70:30) and (60:40) were studied. The proximate analysis, sensory analysis and physical properties of samples were analysed. On the basis of nutritional value, biscuits with ratio (60:40) were acceptable as it contains high fibre content and high ash content as compared to other samples. On the basis of sensory evaluation, whole wheat flour biscuits and 10% fortified biscuits scored highest among all samples. Fortified quinoa seed flour biscuits were found to be highly nutritious