Wild Relatives and Their Contributions to Wheat Breeding

The world is witnessing simultaneous problems of climate change and rapidly increasing population. Research activities have confirmed that the climate change scenario will become more and more adverse and will put extra pressure on the agriculture to produce enough food to feed this and upcoming generations. Wheat is one of the staple crops, serving as a source of nutrition for millions of people all over the world. However, human activities resulted in the genetic erosion in wheat cultivars. Keeping this in view, wheat breeders need new genetic resources having novel alleles that can be used to develop cultivars having higher production, better quality, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Wild relatives of wheat are promising genetic resources having novel genetic variations that have been used in ensuring food and nutritional security, economic development, as well as environmental sustainability. Technological advances in biotechnology and genomics have broadened our scientific understandings regarding phylogenetic relationships among wheat species and consequently have opened new avenues to reconsider the potential of wheat wild relatives and to provide a context for how we can employ them in future wheat breeding programs. This chapter is focused on revealing the contribution of wild relatives in wheat breeding. We made our best effort by compiling existing information regarding the wild relatives and their contributions to wheat breeding. We are confident that provided information will be helpful to the wheat breeders to utilize wheat wild relatives for future wheat breeding. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.