Development of EMS Mutagenized Wheat Mutant Lines Resistant to Fusarium Crown Rot and Fusarium Head Blight

IntroductionWheat (Triticum aestivum) is an important staple food crop that plays a vital role in national food security, and socio-economic development.A complex of plant pathogens belonging to the Fusarium fungal genera are among wheat's most economically important pathogens.The pathogen has however developed resistance to some fungicides.The use of fungicides has also been shown to worsen mycotoxin contamination (McMullen et al. 1997).Unfortunately, efforts to carry out population-breeding programs have not brought sound results or changes in the Fusarium Crown Rot (FCR) and Fusarium Head Blight (FHB)-resistant breeding (Sikora et al. 2011).It is therefore necessary to identify sources of FCR and FHB resistance to lay a foundation for breeding resistant varieties.There are multiple mutation strategies to screen desirable variations for wheat improvement and produce resistant genes from its wild species (Pathirana 2011;Arora et al. 2018).The creation of novel gene mutagenesis changes the nucleotide sequences, allowing the production of alleles.