Combining Ability and Gene Action Controlling Grain Yield and Its Related Traits in Bread Wheat under Heat Stress and Normal Conditions

High temperature is a major environmental stress that devastatingly affects wheat production. Thenceforth, developing heat-tolerant and high-yielding wheat genotypes has become more critical to sustaining wheat production particularly under abrupt climate change and fast-growing global population. The present study aimed to evaluate parental genotypes and their cross combinations under normal and heat stress conditions, exploring their diversity based on dehydration-responsive element-binding 2 gene (DREB, stress tolerance gene in response to abiotic stress) in parental genotypes, and determining gene action controlling yield traits through half-diallel analysis. Six diverse bread wheat genotypes (local and exotic) and their 15 F1 hybrids were evaluated at two different locations under timely and late sowing dates. Sowing date, location, genotype, and their interactions significantly impacted the studied traits: days to heading, chlorophyll content, plant height, grain yield, and its attributes. Cluster analysis classified the parents and their crosses into four groups varying from heat-tolerant to heat-sensitive based on heat tolerance indices. The parental genotypes P2 and P4 were identified as an excellent source of beneficial alleles for earliness and high yielding under heat stress. This was corroborated by DNA sequence analysis of DREB transcription factors. They were the highest homologies for dehydrin gene sequence with heat-tolerant wheat species. The hybrid combinations of P1 × P5, P1 × P6, P2 × P4, and P3 × P5 were detected to be good specific combiners for grain yield and its attributes under heat stress conditions. These designated genotypes could be used in wheat breeding for developing heat-tolerant and climate-resilient cultivars. The non-additive genetic variances were preponderant over additive genetic variances for grain yield and most traits under both sowing dates. The narrow-sense heritability ranged from low to moderate for most traits. Strong positive associations were detected between grain yield and each of chlorophyll content, plant height, number of grains/spike, and thousand-grain weights, which suggest their importance for indirect selection under heat stress, especially in early generations, due to the effortlessness of their measurement.