ICARDA's bread wheat breeding program applies both conventional and molecular approaches to develop and distribute elite bread wheat genotypes, including shuttle breeding, doubled haploids, speed breeding, marker-assisted selection, and critical location testing. These genotypes display high yield potential, drought and heat tolerance, and resistance to rusts, septoria, root diseases, Hessian flies, and Sunn pests. In the last ten years alone, more than 60 bread wheat varieties of ICARDA origin have been released across Central and West Asia, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa by national programs in these regions.
Our key locations test for various breeding traits, for example:
- Wadmedani station in Sudan tests for heat tolerance;
- Sidi Al-Aydi and Merchouch stations (Morocco) for drought tolerance;
- Sids station (Egypt) for yield potential;
- Terbol station (Lebanon) for winter/spring crosses and adaptation to cold; and
- Kulumsa station (Ethiopia) provides excellent opportunities for phenotyping varieties as most of them are recognized global phenotyping platforms.
New bread wheat lines aligned to product lines can also be found in the ICARDA's International Nurseries.