Breeding goals for improving quality traits in durum wheat
1. Submitted To: Dr. Vikram Singh
Asst. Scientist
(Dept. Of Genetics &Plant Breeding)
CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar
Submitted by: Shreya
M.Sc.
(Dept. Of Genetics &Plant Breeding)
CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar
2. INTRODUCTION
• Botanical name - Triticum turgidum L.
var. durum
• Common name - Macaroni wheat
• Family - Poaceae
• Chromosome no. - 2N = 4x = 28
(Tetraploid wheat)
• Origin- Abyssinia, North Africa
Distribution in India- CENTRAL ZONE
(M.P., Maharashtra, Gujarat, Southern
Rajasthan, parts of Punjab)
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3. Durum wheat is a tetraploid wheat originating from an interspecific
hybridization between two wild species widespread in the Fertile
Crescent (today’s Iraq).
The two species were:
– First is Triticum urartu (chromosomal number: 2n = 14, AA genomes)
– Second species is still not known of the genus Aegilops with chromosomal
number 2n = 14, BB genomes.
The spontaneous hybrid gave rise to the species Triticum dicoccoides
(2n = 28, genomes AABB), the wild progenitor of durum wheat from
which the Neolithic man has domesticated durum wheat.
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ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
5. IMPORTANCE
• It is the only tetraploid species of wheat of commercial
importance that is widely cultivated today.
• Despite its lower growing area and lower annual production as
compared to Triticum aestivum, durum wheat is an important
food resource for human diets.
• It is mainly used for making pasta, noodles, breads, biscuits,
cakes, crackers, cookies, muffins, pancake, flat bread and
chapattis, macaroni, spaghetti, pizza and many other products.
• These uses are mainly due to its unique qualities such as its
hardness, high protein content, and gluten strength.
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6. FLORAL BIOLOGY
Inflorescence: Inflorescence of wheat is
called Ear or Head which is botanically a
Spike.
Spike has a central zig zag rachis on which
spikelets are systematically arranged in
pairs except at the tip where single terminal
spikelet is present.
Spikelet is the unit of inflorescence. Each
spikelet is a condensed reproductive shoot
consisting of two subtending sterile bracts
or glumes, enclosing 3-5 florets.
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7. 7
FLORAL BIOLOGY
Glume is boat shaped with rounded
base. Its function is just to protect the
inner florets.
Each spikelet encloses 3-5 florets.
Each floret has two bracts (lemma and
palea), androecium and gynoecium.
The floret is bisexual and
zygomorphic.
Lemma is a brittle structure which
may be awned, (having awns)
awnletted (having small awns) or
awnless (without awns) depending
upon genotype.
Palea on the other hand is a
membranous structure and always
awnless.
8. Lodicules: There are two delicate ovate
lodicules present at the base of ovary.
These are considered to be modified
perianth structures. They absorb water and
swell. Swelling of lodicules leads to flower
opening and anthesis.
Androecium: Male reproductive organ
having three stamens with large anthers.
Produce about 1000-4000 pollen grains per
anther. Wheat pollen is shed in this three-
celled condition.
Gynoecium: Female reproductive organ
having a pistil bearing bifid feathery stigma
on style and has unilocular ovary. 8
FLORAL BIOLOGY
9. ANTHESIS AND MODE OF POLLINATION
Wheat normally is self-pollinated crop as Chasmogamy or
Cleistogamy is usually present.
The main tiller flowers first and the lateral tillers later in the order of
their formation. Blooming is also in the same order.
Flowering begins in the upper part (2/3 rd from the base) of the
spike and proceeds in both the directions.
Florets at anthesis are forced open by the swelling of the lodicules.
Filaments elongate very rapidly, attaining three times their original
length in about 3 minutes.
Stigma receptivity: Stigmas remain receptive for 4 to 5 days and
may prolong to 13 days depending upon the environment.
Pollen viability: Pollen is short lived and remains viable for only 15
to 30 minutes.
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10. Diff. b/w T. durum & T. aestivum
Common hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) endosperm
texture ranges from very soft to hard, whereas the tetraploid
durum wheat (T. turgidum L. ssp. durum) presents the hardest
kernels of all wheat cultivars.
Another major difference between cvs. indirectly related to
hardness is protein quantity and quality. Generally, soft wheat
cvs. have been bred to yield flour containing less protein than
hard wheats, about 8% to 11% versus 10% to 14% protein,
respectively.
Hard wheat cultivars have been selected for high water
absorbtion and hence for thicker endosperm cell walls.
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12. QUALITY TRAITS IN DURUM WHEAT
Quality means “ degree of excellence for a specific use to
serve a specific purpose “
Grain color, protein concentration, and gluten strength are key
traits that influence the grain quality of durum wheat.
Grain quality is well known as one of the most interesting
breeding objectives in many developed countries because of
the increased demand by consumers for high-quality end
products of durum wheat.
High concentration of carotenoid pigments in the endosperm is
an important distinguishing characteristic of durum wheat,
resulting in the yellow translucent appearance of pasta.
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13. SPECIFIC QUALITY REQUIREMENTS
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Industry Traits
Producer High grain yield
Medium plant height and maturity
Disease resistance
High grade
Miller Large kernel size and uniformity
High semolina yield
Good semolina color
Low semolina specks
Processor Strong gluten
High protein concentration
Good spaghetti color
Consumer Good spaghetti color
Spaghetti firmness
Low cooking loss
Exporter High test weight
High protein concentration
Strong gluten
Good spaghetti color
14. BREEDING GOALS
The general objectives of durum wheat breeding are
currently focused on:
Grain yield improvement,
Introducing durable resistance to the main diseases,
Increasing grain quality, particularly the content of
micronutrient in grains,
Improving the knowledge of the genotype
environment (GE) interaction, and
Incorporating biotechnological tools into breeding
programs.
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15. SPECIFIC QUALITY BREEDING GOALS
Breeding for Protein content:
Grain protein content is one of the most important factors
determining pasta and bread-making quality, and is also important to
human nutrition.
High grain protein content (especially the gluten content) is a
primary target for hard durum wheat breeding programs. A grain
protein content greater than 13% is commonly desired for high
quality pasta, while protein levels below 11% produce pasta of
inferior quality.
High grain protein is valued in export markets desiring good end-use
quality.
As protein content increases, the rheological properties of durum
wheat and the overcooking tolerance of the pasta are also often
improved.
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16. INHERITANCE OF THE TRAIT
Protein content is a complexly inherited trait (Polygenic control)
and varies more because of the environments than because of
genetics. It is strongly influenced by environmental effects, such
as soil fertility, rainfall or temperature .
It is also influenced by other physiological factors, such as,
nitrogen uptake, assimilation, and remobilization from leaves
and stems to the grain during grain filling .
Grain protein content can be increased by nitrogen application,
and the development of cultivars with genetically superior grain
protein content.
Grain protein content is negatively correlated with grain yield.
Selection for high protein usually results in low yield
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17. Breeding for Yellow Pigment Content:
Yellow pigments are responsible for the color of semolina, which is
an important end-use quality trait in international markets.
It is known as the yellow index (YI) of semolina at a commercial
level.
Yellow amber color is preferred, due to increased global competition
in pasta market, so color has become more important trait in durum
wheat breeding programs.
Yellow pigment content of durum wheat endosperm is comprised
primarily of carotenoids. Carotenoids are antioxidant compounds that
help to reduce the oxidative damage to biological membranes by
scavenging peroxyradicals .Carotenoids also play an important role
in human health.
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SPECIFIC QUALITY BREEDING GOALS
18. • YPC is controlled by various genes with additive effects that are
affected by different environmental conditions (Schulthess et al.,
2013).
• The “candidate gene approach” has been used in QTL or association
mapping to test SNPs within a candidate gene for a significant
association with the yellow color character.
• The various QTLs identified by various workers for this traits are:
PSY (Pozniak et al., 2007; He et al., 2008; Dibari et al., 2012; Campos et
al., 2016; Vargas et al., 2016)
Lycopene ε-cyclase (LCYE) (Howitt et al., 2009; Crawford and Francki,
2013)
Lycopene β-cyclase (LYCB) (Zeng et al., 2015)
Carotenoid β-hydroxylase (HYD) (Qin et al., 2012)
Carotene desaturase (PDS)
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INHERITANCE OF THE TRAIT
20. CONCEPT OF HETEROSIS
Heterosis is the phenomenon of superiority of F1 over the
parents which is generally produced when two diverse parents
are crossed.
The resultant progeny shows more/ better expression of one or
few characters as compared to both of the parents or the
standard checks.
Various methods to produce hybrids in wheat includes:
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Hand Emasculation and Pollination
Male Sterility Systems (GMS, CMS, CGMS)
Self Incompatibility
Chemical Hybridizing Agents (CHA)
Biotechnological approaches (Transgenic hybrids)
21. Hand Emasculation and Pollination
Crossing in wheat is simple but time consuming and laborious. Since the
flower is bisexual, it is necessary to emasculate or remove the anthers from
the spike that has to be pollinated.
The spike which has to be crossed is selected at a stage when the lower
portion of spike is still inside the flag leaf.
The central florets are removed by holding them with a forceps and pulling
them downward and outward
This leaves only the outermost florets of each spikelet. The awns are cut
slightly below the glumes which helps in the removal of anthers. After
emasculation the ear is normally covered with a butterpaper bag to prevent
natural pollination.
Pollination is effected by placing a freshly opened anther into the
emasculated floret or dusting pollen. After pollination, the bag is again kept
on the pollinated spike to avoid any foreign pollen.
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23. CHEMICAL HYBRIDIZING AGENTS
The earliest report of CHA use in wheat was maleic hydrazide
(Hoagland et al., 1953) followed by anti-lodging and height-reducing
agents like ethephon (Ethrel), gibberellins, and RH531 and RH532. All
these chemicals showed strong phytotoxic effects and inadequate male
sterility across a range of environments and their commercial use was
considered too risky.
RH-007 was used for commercial production in the USA and Europe for a
limited time, because it only worked in select genotypes and in a narrow
application window and was therefore deemed commercially high risk (
Croisor®100, a plant growth regulator (EFSA, 2010), is the only CHA
currently being used in Europe for commercial production of hybrid
wheat.
Although the modern CHAs are effective across a broad range of genotypes
and have reduced phytotoxicity, their commercial deployment is still
hindered by, which is subject to the prevailing environmental conditions. a
narrow window for application
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24. MALE STERILITY SYSTEMS
Cytoplasmic male sterility has been difficult to use due to a lack of
effective fertility-restoration genes. It is also associated with yield
penalties or other undesirable phenotypic effects.
To date, only T. timopheevii derived male-sterile cytoplasms have
been used for commercial production of wheat hybrids (Longin et al.,
2012).
However, this cytoplasm has undesirable side effects that are
environment dependent. These include incomplete fertility
restoration and shrivelled F1 seed, which taken together can
compromise hybrid yield.
Despite the many challenges, engineering CMS could significantly
reduce the labour-intensive exercise of incorporating sterility-inducing
cytoplasm(s) into breeding materials, a significant cost-prohibitive
step to hybrid seed production.
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25. SELF-INCOMPATIBILITY
Self-incompatibility (SI) is a biological mechanism that prevents
self-pollination in open-pollinated species. Although wheat is fully
self-fertile, SI is widespread in the grasses.
In all grass systems studied, gametophytic SI is controlled by two
multiallelic loci, S and Z.
Difficulty in using SI system is that neither S nor Z have been cloned
from any of the grass systems being studied, although both loci have
been mapped at high resolution.
Indeed, despite considerable effort in several different SI systems,
no system has been fully explained at the molecular level
(Franklin-Tong, 2008). However, it may be possible to bring SI into
wheat via a diploid progenitor or close relative such as Secale
cereale.
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26. BIOTECHNOLOGICAL APPROACHES
The first description of the application of recombinant DNA
technologies for engineering a wheat fertility control system was in
1997 by De Block et al. (1997) using barnase- barstar system of
GMS.
This type of dual-component dominant system is limited by the
requirement for transgenes in each crossing partner, which
results in extra breeding time.
The use of transgenes to control fertility is clearly advantageous in
reducing hybrid seed production costs. But Burdensome regulatory
requirements for commercial release and restrictions to world trade
of GM crops have restricted the use of this technology in developing
commercial wheat hybrids.
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27. Heterosis breeding in wheat is less popular due to
following reason:
Floral biology of durum wheat (cleistogamous or chasmogamous flowers)
with limited supply of pollen hampers the controlled mating of parental
genotypes for large-scale seed production in case of manual emasculation
and pollination.
Although, In durum wheat, a two-gene system has been identified that
controls male sterility/ fertility in specific alien cytoplasms but this has ben
associated with negative cytoplasmic effects. (Maan et al., 1999; Simons et
al., 2003).
Another basic requirement for a successful hybrid breeding program is a
sufficient magnitude of heterosis for economically important traits to make
hybrids commercially competitive which is less common phenomenon in
case of durum wheat. (Duvick and Cassman, 1999).
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28. There is Less demand of the crop (4% of total production) as
compared to the bread wheat, which doesn’t attract much
breeders to invest efforts in the crop.
Durum Wheat is allotetraploid, it is natural hybrid. Therefore
extent of heterosis observed is quite low as compared to
substantial increase in other diploid species.
However, constant efforts are being made using multiple
approaches to develop cost effective commercial hybrids in Durum
wheat.
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29. CASE STUDY
Hybrid Breeding in Durum Wheat
M. Gowda, C. Kling, T. Würschum, W. Liu, H. P. Maurer, V. Hahn,
and J. C. Reif
A random sample of 16 elite spring durum wheat lines
adapted to Central European conditions was chosen.
An incomplete set of 40 factorial crosses was made and
advanced to the F2 generation.
Hybridization was performed with the aid of a chemical
hybridizing agent (CHA).
Observations for 8 important economic traits were recorded
in parents as well as F1 hybrids to compare the extent of
heterosis among the crosses.
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31. CONCLUSION
The estimated genotypic variances (σ2 G) of the parents and hybrids (F1 and
F2 ) were significantly larger than zero for all eight traits except number of
spikes per plant in F1 and kernel weight per spike in F2 hybrids.
Parents and F1 hybrids displayed similar σ2 G for grain yield and kernel
weight per spike. In contrast, for the other traits σ2 G was higher for parents
than F1 hybrids.
Genotype × environment (σ2 GE) interaction variances were higher for
parents than F1 hybrids for all traits except number of spikes per plant,
number of kernels per spike and kernel weight per spike.
Average F1 and F2 hybrid performance was higher compared to the parents
for grain yield and yield components. Parents outyielded the hybrids in F1 and
F2 generations on average for quality traits except yellow pigmentation.
Consequently, these findings clearly show that there is a potential to develop
hybrids in durum wheat. The realization of this potential depends on the
successful development of contrasting heterotic groups and effectively solving
the seed production problems.
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32. Hybrid Durum Wheat: Heterosis Of Grain Yield And
Quality Traits
Wessam Akel, Matthias Rapp, Patrick Thorwarth, Tobias Würschum, C Friedrich H Longin
Investigated the heterosis for grain yield and important quality
traits in durum wheat of 33 hybrids built up from 24 parental lines.
Hybrids were produced with the chemical hybridization agent
Croisor®100.
The hybrids and all lines were evaluated in yield trials at five
locations in Germany and France.
Along with grain yield, Six quality traits were assessed on the
harvested samples. This includes protein content, sedimentation,
b-value of the semolina, hectoliter weight and vitreosity.
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CASE STUDY
34. • They observed a wide range of phenotypic values for all traits, yielding
highly signifcant genetic variances and heritabilities.
• The hybrids had a considerably higher grain yield than their parental lines
resulting in on average positive values for mid-parent and better-parent
heterosis.
• For all quality traits, heterosis was close to zero or even negative.
• Estimates for the variance due to GCA were almost all nonsignifcant, and
high amounts of variance due to SCA were identifed for grain yield, protein
content, and sedimentation volume.
• Genetic distance of the parental lines and its correlation with mid- and
better-parent heterosis were low.
Key message of this research: Hybrid durum has a promising yield potential
coupled with good quality, but the efficiency of hybrid seed production must
be improved.
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CONCLUSION
35. ZONE WISE POPULAR VARIETIES
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ZONES VARIETIES
North Western Plain Zone PDW 291, PDW 274, PDW 215, PDW 233,
WH 896, WHD 943
Central Zone HI 8381, HI 8498,HD 4728, HI 8759, HD
4672
Peninsular Zone MACS 2846 , MACS 2694, . DWR 185,
MACS 3125, WHD 948
Northern Hills Zone VL 738, VL 804, HS 240
36. VARIETIES RELEASED BY HAU
WH 896 (1995) & WHD 943 (2011)
• Timely sown, irrigated condition
• Recommended for NWPZ including Punjab, Haryana, Delhi,
Rajasthan, Western Uttar Pradesh, parts of J & K (Jammu &
Kathua Distt.) and parts of H.P. (Paonta Valley & Una Distt.)
WH 912 (2002)
• Timely sown, irrigated condition
• Recommended for Haryana
WHD 948 (2013)
• Timely sown, irrigated condition
• Recommended for Penninsular Zone
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37. POPULAR VARIETIES
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WHEAT: HD 4728 (Pusa Malvi)
Year of release : 2015
Characteristics : A semi-dwarf (90 cm), 120 days maturing durum wheat variety
with genetic yield potential of 6.8 t/ha. The variety has high degree of resistance
to leaf and stem rust diseases. Its has bold and lustrous grains and superior
quality traits for end-use in semolina-based industry.
Average yield : 5.42 t/ha
Production conditions : Timely sown irrigated.
Recommended areas : Central Zone.
38. Hi 8759 (Pusa Tejas)
• One of the varieties of wheat having a high level of rust
resistance.
• It is a high yielding durum wheat variety with an average
yield of >5.7t/ha and potential yield of 7.6t/ha, was released
for timely sown irrigated conditions of Central Zone.
• It is dual purpose variety suitable for making chapatti, pasta
and other traditional food products along with high protein
content (12%), B-Carotene (5.7 ppm).
• High overall acceptability (7.5) and essential micronutrients
like iron (42.1 ppm) and zinc (42.8 ppm).
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39. A new durum (Triticum durum Desf.) wheat
variety MACS 3949 developed for rich
nutritional pasta quality with high zinc and iron
• MACS 3949 is a durum wheat variety developed at Agharkar Research
Institute, Pune derived through selection method from 39th IDYN (CIMMYT).
• The variety was identified by 55th All India Wheat and Barley workshop
CCS HAU, Hissar and subsequently notified by Central Sub Committee on
Crop Standards, India.
• It has high protein content (12.9 %), better nutritional quality (Zinc 40.6 ppm,
Iron 38.6 ppm) with good milling quality (Test weight 81.4 kg/hl) and best
cooking quality for pasta product having highest overall acceptability 7.25.
• The newly developed durum wheat variety MACS 3949 released for
cultivation at Peninsular Zone in India, which is having rich source of
nutritional pasta quality with high zinc and iron content will be a promising
one for future potential of export at international market.
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