Using resistance genes is the most effective measure to control wheat leaf rust. The wheat leaf rust resistance gene Lr15 showed resistance to most Puccinia triticina (Pt) races in China. Further confirmation of the genetic characteristics and position of Lr15 will lay a foundation for marker-assisted breeding and gene cloning. Firstly 13 Pt races were used to test the seedling resistance line RL6052 with Lr15. Furthermore, 257 F₂ plants derived from a cross between RL6052 and the susceptible cultivar Thatcher were inoculated with race PHST for resistance evaluation, and bulked segregant analysis using a 16K SNP array was performed for preliminary mapping of Lr15. Finally, SSR and STS markers were developed within the target region to construct a genetic linkage map for Lr15. The results showed that RL6052 was highly resistant to 12 races. Genetic analysis revealed that the ratio between resistant to susceptible was 192∶65 in the F₂ population, fitting a 3∶1 ratio (=0.012), indicating monogenic dominant inheritance. Lr15 was mapped on a 60.16-87.26 Mb physical interval on chromosome 2DS in the Chinese Spring reference genome (version 1.0) using a 16K SNP array. More markers were developed in this interval and Lr15 was mapped between markers ZBSF63.7 and STS64.4, with a physical interval of 61.27-62.02 Mb, and genetic distances of 0.17 and 0.58 cM, respectively. Two markers ZBSF2D63.9 and ZBSF2D63.92 were co-segregated with Lr15. In this study, the effective resistance gene Lr15 was precisely mapped on chromosome 2DS and closely linked markers were also developed, which laid a foundation for further cloning of this gene, and the closely linked markers can be used for marker-assisted selection for breeding resistant cultivars.

To investigate the effects of a self-developed compound agricultural probiotic inoculant on wheat growth, yield and grain quality, a field experiment was conducted using a new wheat line Dunmai 99-1 during the 2023—2024 and 2024—2025 growing seasons. Under a spraying volume of 250 L per plot (area 85.8 m²) each time, five compound inoculant application levels of 0, 25, 5, 25 ahd 50 L were set, and represented by CK, T1, T2, T3 and T4, respectively. The inoculant was applied five times through drip irrigation from the seedling stage to the grain-filling stage. Agronomic traits, aboveground fresh weight, antioxidant enzyme activities and malondialdehyde content were determined at different growth stages, and yield components, grain yield, and grain quality traits were measured at maturity. The results showed that the compound inoculant significantly promoted wheat growth at the tillering, jointing and booting stages, and exhibited significant yield increasing effects. Compared with the control, the yield increase ranked as T3>T4>T2>T1. Among them, T3 showed the greatest yield advantage, with grain yields of 11 258.56 and 12 046.48 kg·hm^-2 in the two growing seasons, increased by 25.59% and 23.63%, respectively, compared to the control. In terms of grain quality, except that the starch content under T1 was slightly lower than that of CK in the 2024—2025 season, the starch content, crude protein content, wet gluten content, and test weight under the other treatments were generally higher than those of CK. Most grain quality traits showed an increasing trend with increasing inoculant application within a certain range, and T4 showed the best overall performance. In conclusion, the self-developed compound agricultural probiotic inoculant showed good potential for promoting wheat growth, increasing yield, and improving grain quality.

To clarify the effects of crop stubble and fertilizer application on wheat yield and quality, field experiments were conducted with three crop stubble types of maize-soybean intercropping (MS), maize monoculture (M), and soybean monoculture (S), as well as three fertilization levels: no fertilization (NF), 20% reduced fertilization (RF), and conventional fertilization (CF). The differences in wheat yield and quality under different treatments were analyzed. The results showed that fertilization significantly increased wheat yield, with the MRF treatment having the highest yield of 6 322.82 kg·hm^-2, which was not significantly different from the SRF treatment (5 860.32 kg·hm^-2), and increased by 190.7% and 105.1% respectively compared to the unfertilized treatment for the two crops. At the same fertilization level, the yield of monoculture crop was generally higher than that of intercropping crop, and the yield of SNF treatment was 61.37% higher than that of MSNF treatment. In terms of yield components, the number of spikes was significantly affected by the interaction between crop stubble and fertilization. The number of spikes in monoculture crop stubble was higher than that in intercropping crop stubble, and the number of grains per spike was only significantly regulated by fertilization. The number of grains per spike in RF was generally higher than that in CF. MRF treatment showed the best performance in grain morphology traits such as grain length and width, but there was no significant difference compared to SRF treatment. In terms of nutritional quality, fertilization significantly improved the protein and wet gluten content of grains. Under fertilization conditions, the protein content of grains from MS, M, S crops increased by 3.69-4.88, 2.21-2.26 and 3.83-3.93 percentage points, respectively, compared to no fertilization. The wet gluten content increased by 10.23-12.58, 5.64-5.69 and 9.09-9.53 percentage points, respectively. The gelatinization characteristics are synergistically regulated by crop stubble and fertilization, and the gelatinization index of RF is the best. Among them, the peak viscosity (1 338.33 cP) and final viscosity (1 633.33 cP) of SRF treatment are significantly increased by 14.6% and 4.8%, respectively compared to SCF treatment. In terms of rheological properties, intercropping has a significant advantage, with MSRF treatment having longer stability time (2.30 min) and higher quality index (45.55) than other combinations. However, the water absorption rate of soybean stubble (59.00%-61.30%) was not significantly different from that of maize crop. Under the present experimental conditions, soybean monoculture with a 20% reduction in fertilization can achieve high wheat yield, ensuring grain protein and wet gluten content, and optimizing flour gelatinization characteristics, which is the optimal cultivation combination for green, high-yield, and high-quality wheat production.

To explore the evolutionary characteristics of root physiological functions and their correlations with yield traits in wheat varieties from different decades in Henan Province, 28 representative varieties from the 1950s to the 2010s were used as materials. The varieties were grouped into seven decades. The study was conducted using outdoor pot experiments from 2023 to 2025. The root dry weight, root vigor, total nitrogen, and soluble sugar content in roots at different growth stages were systematically determined, and the yield traits were investigated. The results showed that, with the passage of time, the root dry weight of varieties from the 1970s to the 2010s decreased by 13.0% compared with that from 1950s to 1960s, showed a trend of increasing first and then decreasing and eventual stabilization during the growth period. The root-shoot ratio showed the same changing trend as the root dry weight the root-shoot ratios of varieties from the 1970s to the 2010s decreased by an average of 14.0% compared with those of the 1950s to the 1960s, and those of varieties from the 2010s decreased by 20.0% compared with the 1950s. The root vigor of the varieties from 1980 to 2010 was more stable throughout the growth period compared with that of the varieties from 1950s to 1970s, and its decline slowed down in the later growth period remained a high level. The total nitrogen and soluble sugar content in roots continued to increase, both reaching their peaks in the varieties in the 2010s, with increase rate of 25.7% and 25.6% respectively compared with the 1950s, and the peak values for both indicators occurred at the regreening stage. The yield per plant of the varieties in the 2010s increased by 56.2% compared with those in the 1950s, among the yield components, the number of panicles per plant decreased by 29.7%; the thousand-grain weight increased by 52.6%, and the number of grains per panicle increased by 3.9%. The results of the correlation analysis showed that wheat root vigor and total nitrogen concentration at regreening stage were highly significantly positively correlated with the thousand-grain weight, while soluble sugar content was positively correlated with the number of panicles per plant but negatively correlated with the thousand-grain weight during the jointing period. In summary, with the passage of time, the root dry weight and root-shoot ratio of wheat have shown a downward trend in Henan; plant dry matter was allocated more to yield formation; root vigor exhibits a temporal pattern of initial increase followed by decrease, peaking in the 1980s; the total nitrogen and soluble sugar content in roots showed an increasing trend with the advancement of release decades.

To investigate the effects of two alternative splicing variants of wheat receptor-like kinase gene TaNAK1 on agronomic and yield-related traits, this study used the winter wheat cultivar Xiaoyan 6, the wild-type spring wheat cultivar Fielder, and its transgenic lines overexpressing TaNAK1.1 (OE1-1, OE1-9, OE1-11） and TaNAK1.2 (OE2-1, OE2-2, OE2-4). The expression patterns of TaNAK1.1 and TaNAK1.2 in wheat were examined using semi-quantitative RT-PCR (sqRT-PCR) and quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR), respectively. Agronomic and yield-related traits of the transgenic lines under field conditions, along with seedling drought tolerance, were evaluated. The results showed that TaNAK1.1 and TaNAK1.2 exhibited distinct spatiotemporal expression profiles across wheat organs and tissues under normal conditions; TaNAK1.1 displayed relatively high expression levels in grains at 10 and 15 days post-anthesis, whereas TaNAK1.2 showed relatively high expression levels in seedling leaves and flag leaves. Under drought and low-temperature stress conditions, TaNAK1.2 was significantly up-regulated, while the expression of TaNAK1.1 was not induced by these abiotic stresses. The overexpression of TaNAK1.1 and TaNAK1.2 differentially affected agronomic and yield-related traits under field conditions. Compared to wild-type wheat Fielder, TaNAK1.1 transgenic lines showed no significant differences in heading and flowering time or flag leaf area. In contrast, heading and flowering time in TaNAK1.2 transgenic lines were delayed by approximately 5 d, and flag leaf area was reduced by 12.50% to 14.45%. Both TaNAK1.1 transgenic and TaNAK1.2 lines exhibited significant reductions in plant height, tiller number, spike length, number of spikelets per spike, grain size, thousand-grain weight, and grain weight per plant; however, the extent of these reductions varied between the two types of overexpressing lines, with TaNAK1.1 transgenic lines showing greater reductions in grain weight per plant and biomass per plant. The effects of TaNAK1.1 and TaNAK1.2 overexpression on wheat seedling drought tolerance were similar, with both significantly enhancing drought tolerance. Specifically, under drought stress, compared to the wild-type wheat Fielder, the leaves of TaNAK1.1 transgenic and TaNAK1.2 transgenic lines showed significantly increased contents of osmotic adjustment solutes (soluble sugars and proline) and relative water content, along with significantly decreased levels of H₂O₂ and the membrane lipid peroxidation product MDA. Furthermore, their survival rate was also significantly enhanced following extreme drought stress treatment. These results not only reveal the important roles of TaNAK1 alternative splicing in regulating growth, development, and adaptation to abiotic stress in wheat, but also provide new genetic resources for molecular breeding of stress-tolerant wheat.

To investigate the dynamics of dry matter accumulation and translocation, nitrogen uptake and utilization, and grain yield of spring wheat under different mulching practices, a field experiment was conducted in 2024 in the rainfed region of Northwestern China. Four treatments were applied: plastic film mulching (PM), straw strip mulching (SM), crushed straw mulching (CM), and a non-mulching control (CK). The effects of these mulching practices on dry matter and nitrogen accumulation, distribution, translocation, nitrogen use efficiency, and yield formation were analyzed. The results showed that mulching promoted aboveground growth and nitrogen accumulation in spring wheat, with the magnitude of increase ranking as PM>SM>CM. Dry matter and nitrogen allocation responded synchronously to mulching practices. Compared with CK, PM significantly reduced the dry matter and nitrogen distribution proportions in leaves at anthesis by 6.73% and 16.55%, respectively. Meanwhile, SM significantly increased the dry matter and nitrogen distribution proportions in grains at maturity by 5.39% and 6.63%, respectively, compared with PM. Mulching markedly influenced dry matter translocation. Compared with CK, PM significantly increased pre-anthesis dry matter translocation by 84.04%, while CM significantly enhanced post-anthesis dry matter assimilation by 48.46%, with SM exhibiting intermediate values. All mulching treatments significantly increased both pre-anthesis nitrogen translocation and post-anthesis nitrogen assimilation, with increase rate of 35.22% (SM), 32.43% (PM), and 21.26% (CM) for the former, and 34.51% (PM), 17.07% (CM), and 8.95% (SM) for the latter. Mulching also differentially affected nitrogen utilization. PM exhibited the highest nitrogen uptake efficiency, whereas SM and CM showed significantly higher nitrogen harvest indices than PM and CK. Furthermore, all mulching treatments significantly increased grain yield compared with CK, with yield increase rate of 33.10% (PM), 16.09% (SM), and 12.98% (CM). These findings indicate that mulching enhances grain yield by optimizing dry matter and nitrogen accumulation, allocation, and translocation in spring wheat. Taking yield, resource use efficiency, and sustainability into consideration, straw strip mulching (SM) is a highly promising mulching technology in spring wheat production in the rain-fed areas of Northwestern China.

To elucidate the molecular mechanism of the wheat gene TaTPK, which encodes a Pti1-like tyrosine protein kinase, in resistance to stripe rust (Puccinia striiformis West f. sp. tritici), this study used a disease-resistant wheat variety Shumai 126 and a susceptible variety Taichang 29. The function of TaTPK was analyzed using techniques such as qRT-PCR, subcellular localization, virus-induced gene silencing, and histochemical observation. The results showed that after CYR34 infection, the expression level of TaTPK in the resistant variety Shumai 126 was significantly higher than in the susceptible variety Taichang 29. TaTPK encodes a membrane protein, and silencing TaTPK through gene silencing technology weakened the resistance of Shumai 126 to the stripe rust race CYR34, manifested by an increased number of spore pustules, accelerated hyphal growth, decreased H₂O₂ accumulation near infection sites, and a higher percentage of leaf area covered by spores. In summary, TaTPK participates in the wheat resistance response to stripe rust by regulating reactive oxygen accumulation. This study provides a candidate gene resource for durable wheat disease resistance breeding.

Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is tightly coupled with plant photosynthetic functioning and provides a sensitive indicator of vegetation stress. To address the issue of data redundancy that arises during the process of building models directly using raw full-band SIF data, this study first performed correlation analysis on the full-band SIF to identify wavelength regions that are most responsive to wheat stripe rust severity level (SL). Based on the selected sensitive bands, six SIF spectrum indices were subsequently developed through mathematical transformations, including the reciprocal SIF spectrum index (RSI_SIF), logarithmic SIF spectrum index (LSI_SIF), reciprocal logarithmic SIF spectrum index (RLSI_SIF), first order differential SIF spectrum index (FDSI_SIF), sum SIF spectrum index (SSI_SIF), and differential SIF spectrum index (DSI_SIF). Subsequently, the correlations between each index and SL were evaluated, and indices showing stronger associations with SL were selected to develop wheat stripe rust remote sensing monitoring models using random forest regression (RFR) and support vector regression (SVR), which were further validated with independent samples. The results indicated that, all SIF spectrum indices showed stronger correlations with SL than the raw full-band SIF data and the single-band FRSIF datas. Among them, LSI_SIF exhibited the highest sensitivity to SL, achieving correlation improvements of 91% relative to far-red SIF (FRSIF) and 72% relative to the original full-spectrum SIF. In terms of predictive performance, models driven by the SIF spectrum indices generally outperformed those based on FRSIF or untransformed full-spectrum SIF, while RFR delivered superior overall accuracy compared with SVR across experiments. In the controlled plot experiment, the RFR model using full-spectrum SIF as predictors increased R² by 42% and reduced RMSE by 22%, compared with the FRSIF-based model. Moreover, RFR models incorporating RSI_SIF, LSISIF, RLSI_SIF, and SSI_SIF further improved R² by 19%, 21%, 22%, and 21% over the full-spectrum SIF model, accompanied by RMSE reductions of 19%, 22%, 23%, and 22%, respectively. In the field experiment, the corresponding RFR models achieved additional gains in R² of 28%, 27%, 30%, and 23% relative to the full-spectrum SIF model, while decreasing RMSE by 21%, 20%, 22%, and 19%, respectively. Overall, these findings suggest that SIF spectrum indices constructed through mathematical transformations of full-spectrum SIF can effectively enhance the disease-related signal, leading to more accurate and robust estimates of wheat stripe rust severity. The consistent improvements observed across the controlled plot experiment and the field experiment further highlight the stability and potential transferability of the proposed indices, supporting their applicability for operational remote sensing-based crop disease monitoring.

In order to screen salt-tolerant germplasm of oat, 200 oat germplasm resources were subjected to complexed salt stress (NaCl∶Na₂SO₄∶NaHCO₃∶Na₂CO₃ = 1∶9∶9∶1). Six germination indices such as seed vigor index, shoot length and root length were measured. The salt-tolerant ability of oat was comprehensively evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis. The results showed that the combined saline-alkali stress significantly inhibited the germination and early growth of oat germplasm. The germination rate, germination energy, root length, shoot length, and seed vigor index all decreased to varying degrees, among which the vigor index decreased the most, while the salt damage rate increased significantly. Two principal components were extracted by PCA, and the cumulative variance contribution rate was 81.57%. Principal component 1 exhibited a higher loading on seed vigor index, shoot length, root length, and germination rate, reflecting traits related to the germination potential of oats. Principal component 2 was mainly associated with salt injury rate and root length, reflecting the tolerance performance of seeds under salt-alkali stress. Based on the comprehensive evaluation value (D value) in clustering analysis, the germplasms were classified into five groups: highly salt-alkali tolerant group (D≥0.850, 2 germplasms), salt-alkali tolerant group (0.850>D≥0.720, 2 germplasms), moderately salt-alkali tolerant group (0.720>D≥0.460, 15 germplasms), salt-alkali sensitive group (0.460>D≥0.305, 58 germplasms), and extremely salt-alkali sensitive group (D<0.305, 123 germplasms). Two oat germplasm lines with high tolerance (163 and 21) and two oat germplasm lines with tolerance (B106 and B60) to salt-alkali stress were screened.

To provide a basis for formulating carbon and nitrogen reduction measures for wheat production in Jiangsu Province, a carbon and nitrogen accounting boundary for Jiangsu's wheat production system was constructed, analyzing the resource input characteristics and carbon and nitrogen footprint trends from 2014 to 2023, based on the life cycle assessment method. The results indicate that over the decade, the cost per unit area and per unit yield in Jiangsu's wheat production system showed an upward trend. Agricultural input costs were primarily attributed to fertilizers (33.38%-40.06%) and machinery (30.21%-35.72%). The per unit area carbon footprint and per unit yield carbon footprint of wheat were 2.52 t·hm^-2 and 0.46 t·t^-1, respectively, while the per unit area nitrogen footprint and per unit yield nitrogen footprint were 103.96 kg·hm^-2 and 18.89 g·kg^-1. The carbon footprint generally exhibited an increasing trend over time, with an annual growth rate of 2.23%, while active nitrogen emissions showed little variation. In the carbon footprint composition, fertilization and machinery (irrigation and diesel) were the primary sources of wheat carbon emissions, contributing 63.70% and 22.38% to total emissions, respectively. Ammonia (NH₃) volatilization was the main pathway for active nitrogen emissions in wheat production. The per unit yield carbon and nitrogen footprints were significantly negatively correlated with wheat yield. Overall, reducing carbon emissions in wheat fertilization and mechanical operations, along with increasing straw carbon sequestration, are key strategies for lowering wheat production carbon and nitrogen footprints. Measures such as promoting organic fertilizer substitution for chemical fertilizers, integrated water and fertilizer management, straw return, and the use of lightweight agricultural machinery can enhance fertilizer efficiency and mechanical productivity, thereby reducing carbon and nitrogen emissions in wheat production and achieving green, low-carbon, and sustainable development.