Grain Yield Potential Strategies in an Elite Wheat Double-Haploid Population Grown in Contrasting Environments

The understanding of ecophysiological basis of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) grain yield poten tial provides a useful framework to comple ment conventional breeding aimed at achieving genetic gains. This study analyzed the ecophysiological performance of an elite wheat mapping population (105 double-haploid lines derived from two modern cultivars, Bacanora and Wee bil, with similar phenology but different and stable combinations of grain number per area unit (GN) and grain weight (GW) resulting in high grain yield) grown in four contrasting high-yield ing environments, to determine the most suc cessful strategies to increase grain yield poten tial. Main effect of environment on grain yield was significant ( p  0.82, p 0.51, p < 0.0001), a wide range in both components (i.e., GN and GW) was observed across all environments. This population rep resents a valuable resource for prebreeding studies, as the transgressive segregation in physiological and numerical yield components in combination with favorable expression of all agronomic traits could allow a fine phenotyping and mapping to identify key traits and quantita tive trait loci linked with grain yield.