Genes responsible for powdery mildew resistance and improvement in wheat using molecular marker-assisted selection

Plants have the capability to protect themselves from attacks by several types of fungal pathogens. Several powdery mildew resistance genes have been reported at different loci, and most of them have been originated from progenitors of wheat or wild accessions. Powdery mildew resistance is deliberated to be quantitative traits (QTLs), also considered as complex traits, because they are measured by several genes and are affected by fungal pathogens. Numerous researchers have been studied such traits in the past periods for the development of genetic markers, which could be used in several wheat breeding studies mainly encompassing simple sequence repeat, restriction fragment length polymorphism, random amplified polymorphic DNA, single nucleotide polymorphism, and amplified fragment length polymorphism. The discovery of molecular markers and related technologies, such as marker-assisted selection (MAS), has led to the appearance of a new genetic background in plant breeding. MAS would be exceedingly valuable in the cases of polygenic or quantitative disease resistance, in which the individual quantitative trait loci (QTL) would have minute effects on disease development. This review elaborately describes the availability of many molecular markers that recognize the locus of gene mapping for an understanding of the genetic background of disease resistance.