Enhancing Wheat Crop Yield and Quality through Genetic Engineering Technologies: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

The increasing world population has created an alarming situation to meet the demand for food. Ultimately wheat yield is required to be increased proportionally to the world’s population. An estimated increase of 05 tonnes per hectare is direly needed from the current production of 3.3 tonnes by the end of 2050. To achieve this goal it is required to adopt new, emerging, and efficient breeding techniques which caused a recent breakthrough in wheat genome sequencing and provided sufficient information for the traits which are directly related to quality and yield of crops. This review provides a comprehensive overview of tools and techniques which are widely used for discovering the functionality of genes that results in specific phenotypes of Wheat. It gives a deep historical account of the development of wheat transformation techniques and provides an idea about in which way these techniques have been adapted to produce gain-of-function phenotypes through gene overexpression, loss-of-function phenotypes through the expression of antisense RNAs (RNA interference or RNAi). Recently, gene structure and expression manipulation using site-specific nucleases such as CRISPR/Cas9 for genome editing. The review summarizes recent successes in the application of wheat genetic manipulation to enhance yield, improve wheat's nutritional and health-promoting qualities, and boost the crop's resistance to various biotic and abiotic stresses.