Rewiring diversity, physiology, and practice: integrating the next decade of wheat science

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Wheat stands as the backbone of global food security, providing nearly 18% of dietary calories and 19% of protein. The crop faces intensifying climatic extremes, evolving pathogen pressures, resource constraints, and increasing scrutiny regarding environmental sustainability and health narratives. Sustaining genetic gain while broadening resilience and preserving end-use quality represents a defining challenge for contemporary wheat science. Despite these pressures, global wheat production and research have advanced significantly over the past two decades. This Special Issue, based on contributions from the 3rd International Wheat Congress (IWC) 2024 in Perth, Western Australia, presents original research and review articles highlighting emerging themes and advances in wheat research. Wheat is the world’s most important cereal crop and serves as a primary staple food for millions of people worldwide (Yao et al., 2025). It constitutes a cornerstone of global agricultural production systems and food security. The wheat yield in two major wheat-producing regions, Asia and Europe, between 2000 and 2020 increased by ∼32% and 25%, reaching average yields of 3.4 t ha–1 and 4.1 t ha–1, respectively (FAO, 2022). These gains have been supported by remarkable progress in genetics and genomics, advanced breeding methodologies, and the development of improved, climate-resilient wheat varieties around the world. Over the past decade, wheat science has undergone a methodological transformation. Chromosome-scale reference genomes, pan-genomic analyses, and high-density haplotype maps have revealed extensive structural variation and previously underexploited allelic diversity (Jiao et al., 2025; White et al., 2025). At the same time, climate change has amplified the frequency of heatwaves and terminal droughts, thus expanding the soil salinity and rising variability in seasonal rainfall patterns, thereby heightening production risks (Anand and Mishra, 2025). Despite impressive yield gains during the Green Revolution and post-Green Revolution eras, evidence of yield plateaus in several major wheat-growing regions has stimulated renewed discussion in the last years, regarding the limits of conventional selection and the need for new breeding paradigms (Harikrishna et al., 2022). Simultaneous quality-dependent production systems create a persistent sustainability paradox: high grain protein concentrations required for breadmaking quality are strongly linked to nitrogen inputs, yet reducing nitrogen use is essential to lower environmental footprints (Zörb et al., 2018; Kang et al., 2026). These intersecting pressures frame a central tension: how to expand genetic diversity and enhance stress resilience while maintaining yield stability, quality, and sustainability. Modern wheat breeding must therefore operate across multiple scales. At the genomic level, breeding strategies must, on the one hand, reintroduce and manage diversity while preserving polyploid stability, and on the other hand learn from gene regulation and sequence diversity to generate new variation by new genomic techniques. At the physiological level, strategies must integrate water relations, carbon allocations, and ion dynamics into predictive frameworks of performance. At the systems level, they must integrate biological and ecological interactions with economics, seed production logistics, nitrogen stewardship, and public perception. The 3rd IWC, held in September 2024 in Perth, Western Australia and hosted by Murdoch University's Centre for Crop and Food Innovation and the WA State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, provided a comprehensive platform for leading scientists, researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders to share cutting-edge advances in wheat breeding, genetics, genomics, physiology, and agronomy, discuss challenges and opportunities, and foster future research collaborations. This Special Issue explored the full spectrum of emerging themes in wheat research. It includes original research papers and review articles by experts covering a range of topics. This special collection advances a systems view of wheat improvement from wild relative alleles and recombination control to heat imaging, drought hydraulics, salinity reframing, disease resistance, hybrid systems, and societal narratives about wheat (Box 1). Together, these studies chart practical routes towards durable resilience while acknowledging the inherent trade-offs among yield, quality, and sustainability. Wheat adaptation to major biotic and abiotic stresses, including rust, heat, drought, cold, and salinity, is governed by coordinated morphological, physiological, and molecular responses such as stomatal regulation, osmotic adjustment, membrane stabilization, ion homeostasis (Na+/K+ balance), ROS detoxification, and protein protection. Expansion of the allelic space through phenotyping-assisted introgression of wild genetic resources helps mitigate domestication bottlenecks and facilitates the incorporation of novel adaptive variation into modern breeding pools. In the context of rust resistance, the integration of haplotype stacking with GWAS-informed trait discovery enables the identification and pyramiding of resistance-associated loci to enhance disease resilience across diverse environments. Coupled with high-throughput phenotyping these approaches strengthen adaptive capacity across genotype × environment × management (G × E × M) interactions by modulating key physiological processes including photosynthetic efficiency, transpiration dynamics, and water-use optimization. Translating trait-level insights into system-level breeding strategies through high-plasticity genotypes, genic male sterility-based hybrid wheat systems, and data-driven decision frameworks facilitates the development of climate-resilient cultivars with improved yield stability, resource-use efficiency, and nutritional value for future wheat production systems. Created in BioRender. Chitikineni, A. (2026) https://BioRender.com/4fpeh0b. AI assistance (Microsoft Copilot) was used to generate some sub-figures, which were subsequently edited and finalized by the authors using BioRender. Wheat production and productivity are continuously challenged by a range of biotic and abiotic stresses, further intensified by the growing threats of global climate change (Singh et al., 2023). At the same time, the global population is projected to increase by nearly 2 billion people over the next 30 years, placing unprecedented pressure on food systems and sharply increasing demand for wheat (Lam, 2025). Meeting this rising demand is becoming increasingly difficult due to the slowdown in yield gains, driven in part by the progressive narrowing of genetic diversity within modern cultivars (Cheng et al., 2024). Centuries of directional selection for yield, adaptation, and agronomic performance have progressively narrowed the genetic base of modern bread wheat, creating a pronounced domestication bottleneck (Cheng et al., 2024). This erosion of diversity has increased the vulnerability of the crop to emerging diseases and intensifying environmental stresses associated with climate change. These limitations, however, can be effectively addressed through the strategic use of wheat wild relatives (WWRs), which harbour extensive untapped genetic diversity for resilience traits such as drought, heat, salinity tolerance, and durable disease resistance. Integrating this wild diversity into breeding pipelines offers a powerful route to restoring genetic breadth and strengthening the adaptive capacity of modern wheat. Therefore, to tackle the challenges, efforts are being made to utilize WWRs as a valuable genetic resource for improving wheat resilience and productivity (Farooq et al., 2026). The progress in wheat now hinges on converting diversity derived from wild relatives, historical germplasm, and precise genome edits into deployable haplotypes that can be stacked, tra

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