Incorporation of Barley Chromosomes into Wheat

Abstract

Wide crosses between different plant species and even between different genera have interested plant breeders and botanists since before the turn of the century. Wheat (Triticum),being the most important food crop of the world, has attracted most attention and it has been hybridized extensively with “alien” species belonging to several neighboring genera (Islam 1980a; Sharma and Gill 1983). The objectives in hybridizing wheat with barley are manifold. The prospect of transferring desirable agronomic characters like tolerance to drought or soil salinity from barley to wheat prompted some early workers to attempt wheat-barley hybridizations. More recent considerations are to transfer nematode and disease resistance genes from barley to wheat. Furthermore, hybrids between wheat and barley are the starting materials for determining the evolutionary and genetical relationship between wheat and barley chromosomes.