In the past month, five members of the Wheat Genetics Resource Center (WGRC) took their work from international stages in Europe to a major plant-breeding conference in Texas, sharing new findings on wheat disease resistance, genomics and advanced field phenotyping.
WGRC Director, Dr. Eduard Akhunov, represented the Center at the 4th International Wheat Congress (IWC) in Bologna, Italy, where he delivered a keynote lecture May 27, 2026. His talk, “Historical genomics of host-pathogen interaction in wheat rust pathosystem,” highlighted how looking back through wheat’s genomic history can clarify the long-running evolutionary contest between wheat and rust pathogens. These insights can inform modern efforts to breed more durable resistance.
Closer to home, four WGRC graduate students presented posters at the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) meeting in College Station, Texas, on June 15, 2026. Together, the presentations reflected a broad view of today’s wheat-improvement toolbox, spanning traditional germplasm exploration, disease-resistance genetics and next-generation prediction methods.
Jaime Knight presented research on “Ancestral Germplasm As a Source of Fusarium Head Blight Resistance in Bread Wheat,” focusing on how older and diverse wheat relatives and lines may contain resistance traits that can be brought into modern breeding programs. Fusarium head blight remains one of the crop’s most damaging diseases, affecting yield and grain quality, and breeding for resistance is a longstanding priority.
Buket Sahin’s poster, “Genetic architecture and evolution of stripe rust resistance uncovered using diverse panels of wheat lines and North American Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici isolates,” examined the genetic basis of stripe rust resistance using a diverse spring wheat panel evaluated against multiple North American stripe rust isolates. By integrating host genetic diversity with pathogen race-specific responses, this work aims to identify resistance-associated genomic regions and improve understanding of how wheat resistance effectiveness may change as pathogen populations evolve.
Nick Stelling presented “Root System Architecture Trait Discovery in Aegilops tauschii Introgression Population,” exploring below-ground traits that can influence how plants acquire water and nutrients. Using introgression material derived from Aegilops tauschii, a key wild progenitor of bread wheat, this research targets root characteristics that may ultimately support stronger performance under variable environmental conditions.
Gabriela Romero Campos shared “Phenomic prediction models for wheat grain yield in Aegilops tauschii introgression germplasm using multi-temporal UAV images across multiple environments,” demonstrating how multispectral drone imagery can be used to predict grain yield in introgression lines. The work evaluates five predictive models under two cross-validation schemes, showing that validation strategy determines model selection, and that adding NIR and Thermal sensors consistently improves prediction accuracy for penalized linear models. The findings point toward more scalable phenotypic screening tools for pre-breeding programs working with Ae. tauschii germplasm.
From Bologna’s International Wheat Congress halls to poster sessions in College Station, the WGRC’s recent conference presence underscored both the global reach of wheat research and the Center’s role in connecting fundamental discovery to practical breeding outcomes.
