Adaptation progress and challenges of winter wheat breeding in China under climate warming

Context: Plant breeding has successfully adapted crops globally, with one of the emerging challenges being the adaptation to progressively warmer days and nights. While the adaptation of wheat varieties to future climate conditions is crucial, a thorough understanding of this process remains limited. Objective: Here, we evaluated genetic advancement under current and future climates by using a dataset of real wheat breeding trials using 9669 wheat varieties from 2012 to 2023. Results and conclusions: The findings revealed the following: Under climate change, yield decreased by mean 1.44 % for advanced wheat breeding strains, compared with that of the check varieties (-2.49 %). Yields of advanced wheat breeding lines decreased by mean 3.16 % per 1 degrees C warming compared with those of check varieties (-4.52 %), indicating the superior climate resilience of the former. Wheat yield losses due to warming occurred frequently in the later stages of wheat growth (heading-maturity). Under the future climate in four shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, SSP5-8.5), advanced winter wheat breeding varieties had difficulty overcoming the declining yield trend, suggesting that breeding heat-tolerant wheat varieties will continue to be a priority and a challenge in managing under the conditions of climate warming. Significant: Our study highlights that accelerating the current progress in breeding for heat tolerance in wheat is imperative.