To secure the future of global wheat production against the growing threats of climate change and evolving agricultural diseases, researchers at HUN-REN Centre for Agricultural Research (ATK) have announced significant breakthroughs in crop wild relative (CWR) pre-breeding. By successfully transferring robust survival traits from ancient, wild grass species into modern wheat lines, the ATK team is developing crops capable of withstanding severe drought and devastating fungal pathogens. These activities are implemented into the European Horizon project, COUSIN, where researchers of 26 European institutions from 12 countries are working on the utilization and conservation of crop wild relatives of 5 flagship crops (including wheat) for a more sustainable agriculture.

Combatting Major Crop Diseases
A primary focus of the ATK research involves protecting wheat from crippling fungal infections, specifically powdery mildew, yellow rust, stem rust, and leaf rust. Using BluVision Micro, a machine learning-aided microscopic imaging system in Gatersleben (IPK), researchers screened a diverse population of Aegilops biuncialis, a wild relative of wheat. The screening revealed that 28 out of 180 wild grass genotypes were completely resistant to powdery mildew, showing zero fungal colonies. In subsequent tests involving wheat crossed with Ae. biuncialis, four resulting genotypes demonstrated exceptional resistance, with infection rates remaining below 2%. Furthermore, testing against yellow rust showed that 108 out of 180 evaluated wild lines exhibited complete resistance to the disease.

The team also achieved notable success using Triticum timopheevii, another ancient wheat relative. In artificially inoculated field nurseries, 88 advanced crossbred lines were tested. Researchers identified seven genotypes completely resistant to stem rust and nine completely resistant to leaf rust, providing highly promising genetic sources for future agricultural use and wheat improvement.

Advancing Drought Tolerance
To combat increasing global water scarcity, ATK utilized an automated, high-throughput phenotyping platform to measure how various wheat-wild grass hybrids respond to a 10-day water withholding period. The research identified specific genetic material from the wild grass Aegilops comosa as a highly promising source for improving drought tolerance in wheat. Additionally, crosses between wheat and Agropyron×glael resulted in six specific lines (MvGla, Gla2, Gla3, Gla7, Gla8, and Gla9) that exhibited significantly better drought tolerance than standard parental wheat varieties. Recent findings, published in Plant Cell Reports and Theoretical and Applied Genetics, confirmed that replacing specific wheat chromosomes with those from these hardy wild relatives leads to markedly increased drought tolerance during critical growth stages like flowering.

Enhanced Nutritional Value and Farming Applications
Beyond survival traits, the integration of wild genetics is showing strong potential to improve the nutritional profile and farming adaptability of wheat. Rapid grain measurements from recent harvests identified several promising crossbred lines with high protein contents exceeding 14%, gluten contents surpassing 35%, and Zeleny sedimentation (baking quality indicator) exceeding a value of 50. Multi-year small plot trials on CWR-derived advanced winter wheat breeding lines were set up at low-input and high-input sites of ATK. Based on the average grain yield data from 3 sites from the first year, 6 promising wheat × T. timopheevii introgression lines have outperformed the control wheat variety and 9 more lines were yielded less but within the statistical significance range. Field trials also evaluated the performance of T. timopheevii under different agricultural management systems. The organic trial site produced the highest mean yield at 2.56 tonnes per hectare, with the top-performing accession yielding an impressive 4.2 tonnes per hectare, indicating strong potential for organic and low-input farming systems, as it can been seen regarding other hulled cereal species, like einkorn and emmer wheat. Additionally, to see the pedo-climatic adaptability of this 15 T. timopheevii line to different European regions, the same set was sent to COUSIN partners APRISCO, GZPK, RSR and CSIC, for agronomic evaluation.

Cutting-Edge Genomic Tools
To achieve these results, ATK has implemented advanced genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) protocols and highly efficient cytogenetic tools, such as the ‘SteamDrop’ technique, which allows researchers to process hundreds of plant samples simultaneously to track exactly where wild DNA has integrated into the wheat genome. These technological advancements enable highly precise breeding, ensuring that only beneficial traits are passed on to future wheat varieties.

A COUSIN core collection (MVCUS) was set up from 45 ATK prebreeding lines (originated from different CWR-based crosses) and their parents, which was sent to COUSIN partners GZPK, APRISCO, CSIC and RSR for detailed phenotyping trials that will improve the understanding of the pedo-climatic adaptability of the lines and will help to finetune the genomic association studies.

Crop Wild Relative (CWR)	Primary Benefit Discovered at ATK	Key Finding / Outcome
Aegilops biuncialis	Disease Resistance	108 lines showed complete resistance to yellow rust; selected crosses showed <2% powdery mildew infection.
Aegilops comosa	Drought Tolerance	Promising genetic source; crossed lines showed no significant yield loss in seeds per plant under drought stress.
Agropyron × glael	Drought Tolerance	Six specific introgression lines exhibited much higher drought tolerance than standard cultivated wheat.
Triticum timopheevii	Organic Yield & Resistance	Yielded up to 4.2 t/ha in organic systems; provided total resistance to stem and leaf rust in select lines. Crossed lines can outperform the best winter wheat cultivars.