The severity of water stress is projected to increase in many production environments and it has never been more important to deliver the findings of drought research to farmers. This paper focuses on one segment of the pathway—the process from genetic characterisation to cultivar delivery— with emphasis on wheat, one of the world’s most important food crops. A combination of targeted genetic diversity, improved phenotyping and enhanced exploitation of publicly available international germplasm is recommended as an efficient and effective strategy to improve crop productivity in water-limited environments.

This review describes the impact of drought on yield, trends in yield for boosting crop yields to meet the projected demands of rising global population by 2050, and genetic gain achieved by plant breeding in the last decades in wheat. In addition, it discusses recently developed techniques (i.e. genomic selection and high-throughput phenotyping) integrated with current approaches for improving drought in wheat.

Durum wheat is cultivated in countries with highly fluctuating water availability and high temperatures. Breeding will greatly benefit from the improved knowledge of its adaptive response to such environments. Here, 76 quantitative trait loci (QTLs) were identified for grain yield, yield components and adaptive traits across Mediterranean environments. Two QTLs on chromosomes 2B and 3B showed major effects on all investigated traits and can thus be considered as major determinants of adaptation.

Physiological characters are useful surrogates for selection for yield in wheat under drought conditions. The understanding of genetic inheritance of these characters is crucial for planning wheat breeding programs. This paper is dealing with genomic analysis of these characters which help the breeders to plan wheat breeding programs.

Genotypic diversity in response to drought and heat stress, individually or in combination, of three spring wheat cultivars was investigated. In all cultivars, stomatal conductance was the most sensitive variable to drought, followed by photosynthetic rate, leaf water potential and relative water content the least. The different sensitivity of stomatal conductance to soil drying between the three cultivars reveal their adaptability to different drought and/or heat stress scenarios, which could be used for selecting suitable cultivars grown in a certain environment.

This study aims to identify the possible biochemical markers in the form of boiling soluble proteins for making drought-tolerant high yielding crops. The induced, enhanced and differential expression of boiling-soluble proteins (Bsp40, BsHSP, BsGST) under drought in the tolerant cv. PBW 175 suggests the relevance of these BSPs in conferring drought tolerance to the cv. PBW 175.

Understanding the genetic control of agronomic traits is important to better design a crop improvement program. We studied the genetic control of root length under water stress and found that genotypes with longer roots have more dominant genes than others. Drought resistant genotypes can be developed by incorporating genotypes with more dominant genes into a wheat breeding program.

Wheat plants growing in the N-adequate soil were more sensitive to drought stress than those growing in the N-limited soil. The response of the expression of the NRT and AMT genes to soil drought largely depends on N application, wheat genotype and growth stage. The expression of TaNRT2.1 in efficient N uptake wheat genotype was significantly higher than in inefficient N uptake genotype.