Genetics, not environment, contributed to winter wheat yield gains in Ontario, Canada.

Changes in entries' market classes and genetic improvements within classes-not environmental changes-enhanced yields over thirty-one years of wheat trials. Correlations between yields and ancestries drove genomic prediction accuracies. Increasing crop yields is important for enhancing farmers' livelihoods, meeting market demands, and reducing the environmental impact of agriculture.

Improving and Maintaining Winter Hardiness and Frost Tolerance in Bread Wheat by Genomic Selection.

Winter hardiness is a major constraint for autumn sown crops in temperate regions, and thus an important breeding goal in the development of new winter wheat varieties. Winter hardiness is though influenced by many environmental factors rendering phenotypic selection under field conditions a difficult task due to irregular occurrence or absence of winter damage in field trials. Controlled frost tolerance tests in growth chamber experiments are, on the other hand, even with few genotypes, often costly and laborious, which makes a genomic breeding strategy for early generation selection an attractive alternative.

Combining grain yield, protein content and protein quality by multi-trait genomic selection in bread wheat.

Simultaneous genomic selection for grain yield, protein content and dough rheological traits enables the development of resource-use efficient varieties that combine superior yield potential with comparably high end-use quality. Selecting simultaneously for grain yield and baking quality is a major challenge in wheat breeding, and several concepts like grain protein deviations have been developed for shifting the undesirable negative correlation between both traits. The protein quality is, however, not considered in these concepts, although it is an important aspect and might facilitate the selection of genotypes that use available resources more efficiently with respect to the quantity and quality of the final end products.

Simultaneous selection for grain yield and protein content in genomics-assisted wheat breeding.

Large genetic improvement can be achieved by simultaneous genomic selection for grain yield and protein content when combining different breeding strategies in the form of selection indices. Genomic selection has been implemented in many national and international breeding programmes in recent years. Numerous studies have shown the potential of this new breeding tool; few have, however, taken the simultaneous selection for multiple traits into account that is though common practice in breeding programmes.