Identification of tolerance for wheat rusts: Insights in recent QTL mapping efforts

Unprecedent weather events are increasing the global temperature of earth which poses serious challenges to agricultural production. Climate changes are affecting the global agriculture and is a major concern for food security in the coming years. The temperature fluctuations induced the attack of several crop pathogens which can completely or partially destroy the field crops and reduce the grain yield. Wheat is an important staple grain crop cultivating in almost every region of the world and consuming by more than 4 billion people worldwide. Among several biotic stresses, rust is the most damaging diseases of wheat caused by different fungal pathogens. There are different types of wheat rust diseases among which wheat stripe rust, wheat stem rust, and wheat leaf rust are the most common, which are causing serious loss to wheat crop. Advancement in molecular breeding approaches provides excellent opportunity to map resistant loci/alleles that can be transferred through breeding to produce elite wheat genotypes. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) is a powerful technique to identify the unique hotspot for rust resistant in wheat and a large number of QTLs have been already found which provide substantial resistant to wheat crop.