Breeding adult plant resistance to stripe rust in spring bread wheat germplasm adapted to Sichuan Province of China

Abstract

Sichuan is an important wheat producing province of China where severe stripe rust epidemics occur annually. Developing high-yielding wheat varieties with good and stable stripe rust resistance is a foremost breeding objective of all breeding programs. Because minor gene based adult-plant resistance (APR) is considered durable, a shuttle breeding program between Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (SAAS) and CIMMYT was initiated in 2000 to transfer APR identified in CIMMYT wheats to wheat germplasm adapted in Sichuan. During 2007?2009, a total of 669 advanced generation lines obtained from this shuttle breeding effort were provided to the Plant Protection Research Institute, SAAS for official multi-environment stripe rust tests, and 231 elite lines were characterized for yield performance by the agronomists at the Crop Research Institute, SAAS. Between 11?39% lines were highly resistant depending on the year of testing and 17 (7.3%) lines had 5% or higher yields than the check mean. The adapted resistant lines are being used by various breeding programs to enhance resistance diversity, and three lines are being tested in National or Provincial Yield Trials for possible releases