Landraces-potential treasure for sustainable wheat improvement

Agricultural production is facing serious threat from various biotic and abiotic stresses specifically under climatic challenges. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill global food demand from limited arable land by cultivating modern cultivars with low buffering capacity. Primitive cultivars and landraces are evidently proven to be rich source of genetic variability as against modern cultivated varieties due to thousands of years’ of their cultivation under low input farming systems and extreme environmental conditions. Landraces serve as a potential reservoir of desirable allelic forms of valuable traits and therefore, could help in biodiversity enrichment and subsequently, stabilization of crop production under rapidly changing climatic conditions. Therefore, characterization and evaluation of untapped and unexplored landraces will be beneficial for harnessing genetic variability for economically important traits, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance and other desirable traits including quality, into modern high-yielding cultivars. A large collection of wheat landraces with enormous variability for different traits still remain within genebanks, without being explored for their utility. With the advancement of modern technologies, untapped variation of landraces can be easily made accessible through extensive phenotyping and trait discovery by using high throughput genomics approaches. Use of landraces in crop improvement will facilitate restoration of genetic diversity lost during the course of domestication and will benefit humankind worldwide by ensuring the incorporation of climate resilience and nutritional traits in modern cultivars. This review provides information about the evolution and diversity of wheat landraces and their utilization in wheat improvement for biotic and abiotic stresses and for quality traits.