Drought stress tolerance in Wheat: Recent QTL mapping advances

In the last decade, the increasing of global warming has bad impact on crop plants. Climate
change is a major threat for plants in several locations including tropical and subtropical areas.
Global warming has negative effects on plants including drought resistance. Drought
stress is a global challenge that significantly impacts crop productivity. It adversely affects plants at
morphological, physiological, and molecular levels. However, plants can adapt to drought stress through
mechanisms that can be modified using breeding techniques, such as drought avoidance, drought
tolerance, drought escape, and hardening. Wheat plants, for instance, can survive under drought stress
by altering their internal mechanisms or activating specific signaling pathways. In response to drought
stress, wheat plants exhibit a variety of morphological, physiological, and biochemical adaptations. In
addition, molecular breeding is a very good step to reduce the effect of drought stress on wheat
plants. In molecular breeding, several drought drought-resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs)
have been identified. In this review paper, we included some major drought drought-stress QTLs
for wheat.