Genomic Selection-Driven Wheat Breeding for Superior Genetic Gains: Status Quo and Future Steps

Conventional breeding approaches rely on phenotypic selection, which is a crucial phase in crop breeding. Breeders have been able to make use of molecular markers to aid in breeding efforts since a large number of markers were made accessible from the early 1990s. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) is a widely employed technique in molecular breeding, predominantly applicable to traits controlled by only a few of the major genes. Most economic traits found in crops are intricate and controlled by a large number of genes, each of which has very little impact on the trait’s value, making it difficult to integrate MAS into breeding practice to the extent anticipated. This shortcoming of MAS necessitates the addition of genome-wide markers. Genomic selection (GS) is a more advanced version of MAS. The goal is to obtain more thorough and accurate selection by using genome-wide markers to quantify the impacts of all loci and afterwards calculate a genomic estimated breeding value upon which new superior genotypes are selected. Because of advancements in sequencing and genotyping technology, genomic selection (GS is now widely used in plant breeding projects across the world. Genomic selection is one of the most promising strategies for speeding up the process of breeding for improved traits. There have been many attempts to optimize the training population size, inter-individual relationships, marker type and density, and the incorporation of pedigree information, environmental covariates, and other parameters in order to increase prediction accuracy for complex traits in wheat. Now that we have access to high-throughput, in-depth imaging and phenotyping technologies, we may use this data to increase the reliability of our predictions by factoring in more relevant secondary traits. In this chapter, we present an in-depth look back at how far GS-based breeding approaches have come in the quest to improve wheat.