Abstract
Climate change requires breeders and pre-breeders to harness new sources of genetic variation, as having a narrow genetic base is detrimental for continued food production targets projected for 2050 globally. Finding tolerance across alien resources is not an obstacle. It's where that tolerance resides and the nature of the alien source as to its genetic make-up. From the mid-1950s the interest on wild wheats has existed and numerous academic findings emanated, but the most impacting potential that has now become a forte for progress is seen in the closely related diploid (2n=2x=14) progenitor species that are genome-wise homologous to the wheat genome like D (Aegilops tauschii) and A (Triticum urartu ssp. boeoticum, monococcum). Hence from the mid-1980s, the wheat progenitor accessional diversity exploitation emerged on the scene. This allowed researchers to target their time based practical productivity returns by selecting the most related alien resources around wheat/alien homologous chromosome pairing to affect a maximum recombination output and exploit the primary Triticeae gene pool. The complementation of just one extensively used resource (Ae. tauschii) has since the 1990s opened up a resource to capture allelic diversity for many stresses, enrich the molecular diagnostic tools and provide outputs that are also extremely valuable for the environmental shifts that are coming up, notably like salinity, drought, and more vital, the "heat" regimen changes. These new novel wheats known as "synthetic wheats" based upon the cultivated wheat's D-genome accessional genetic diversity have shown superb promise. This experiment with the same Ae. tauschii accession male parent crossed with different durum cultivars as the female parent (78 entries) is designed to study the inheritance of different genes and also to identify the effect of cytoplasmic inheritance, if any. The total of 78 entries was screened against two biotic stresses (Karnal bunt and stripe rust), phenologically characterized and analyzed with SSRs for molecular characterization.