Khalid MU and Ashraf MH, 2025. Genetic and genomic insights into drought and heat tolerance co-adaptation in wheat. Trends in Animal and Plant Sciences 6: 79-104. https://doi.org/10.62324/TAPS/2025.082

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Wheat, one of the world main staple crops feeding a huge fraction of human being, faces an increasing threat of drought and heat stress that reduce its productivity. These abiotic stresses frequently occur together at key developmental stages and lead to significant yield losses due to decreased photosynthesis, increased senescence, limited grain filling and overall deterioration of grain quality. Overcoming these challenges necessitate an integrative knowledge of physiology, biochemistry, and molecular responses, underpinned by innovative breeding and genomics activities. This review integrates the available knowledge about the use of different genomic tools, such as high-throughput genotyping, genome-wide association studies, transcriptomics and whole-genome sequencing, to reveal genes and quantitative trait loci associated with stress tolerance. It also emphasizes both the epigenetic regulation and the integration of multi-omics as well as the cross-species trait mining for more profound understanding of complex stress adaptation mechanisms. In addition, breeding approaches including trait pyramiding, marker-assisted backcrossing, genomic prediction and pre-breeding with wild relatives should be assessed as desirable methods to stack adaptive traits into elite cultivars. Specifically, photosynthetic efficiency under combined stresses is indicated as a main target to increase resilience under integrated stressed conditions. This comprehensive framework leverages advances in genomics, systems biology and predictive breeding to provides a roadmap towards breeding wheat cultivars with the ability to stably perform under increasingly variable and extreme climates.