Application of new knowledge, technologies, and strategies to wheat improvement

There have been many changes impacting wheat improvement since the 1996 International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center Wheat Yield Symposium. This review highlights a few of the technological advances and impacts of new knowledge on wheat improvement that have occurred in the past 10 years as well as on-going challenges. One of the most dramatic discoveries has been the revelation that the genomes of graminaceous crops are complex, rapidly evolving, and heterogeneous, even within species. The use of marker-assisted selection for improving complex traits is one of the challenges facing wheat breeders. Integration of association analysis into conventional breeding programs is proposed as a crop improvement strategy that has the potential to improve the efficiency of molecular breeding.