Wheat is an important cereal crop, providing stable sustenance for billions of people worldwide. The narrow genetic base of cultivated hexaploid wheat is one of the critical constraining factors that makes it prone to a range of biotic and abiotic stresses. Globally, plant diseases and pests cause approximately 21.5% yield losses in wheat annually, potentially escalating global food insecurity.

Additionally, climate change is bringing new challenges, such as the emergence of novel and more adaptive pathogen isolates. Wheat wild relatives (WWRs) are crucial in providing many beneficial stress resilience traits for wheat improvement. Evaluation of some of the WWRs, including Aegilops umbellulata and Ae. geniculata, Ae. comosa, Ae. sharonensis, Ae. peregrinum, and Ae. neglecta identified strong resistance against multiple wheat rusts, and the genetic and genomic characterization of the resistance sources are at advanced stages.

For Ae. umbellulata, we have generated a telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of an accession “PI 554389”, containing resistance against multiple wheat diseases, including wheat rusts. The novel resistance genes are being characterized using biparental genetic mapping, association analysis, and transcriptomics approaches.

Similarly, introgression sizes have been precisely estimated for leaf and stripe rust resistance, such as Lr56/Yr38(Ae. sharonensis), Lr59 (Ae. peregrinum), and Lr62/Yr42(Ae. neglecta). Characterization of rust resistance genes and genetic/genomic resources developed for these WWRs will be presented.