Abstract
Fusarium head blight (FHB) of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), often results in significant economic losses to producers and
end-users of the crop throughout the Great Plains of the United States. The development and release of resistant cultivars is an
important component of an overall disease management strategy to minimize these losses, and perhaps the most cost-effective
component. Spring wheat cultivars with Fhb1, a single gene resistance deriving from a Chinese source have been highly
effective in limiting losses to the disease. However, as the source of resistance is not adapted to the Great Plains, there is a
concern that cultivars with Fhb1 also express lower grain yield. To address this concern for winter wheat, current study was
conducted to evaluate 21 ‘Wesley’ BC2F6 lines with Fhb1 together with four adapted winter wheat check cultivars (‘Arapahoe’,
‘Lyman’, ‘Overland’, ‘Wesley’) without Fhb1for grain yield, grain volume weight, anthesis date, plant height, spikes per
square meter, kernels per spike and thousand grain weight at two environments each in Nebraska and South Dakota. Trials at
locations were planted to three replicates in an alpha-lattice design. Seven BC2F6 lines showed similar performance to Wesley
for most of the measured traits including grain yield. One or more of those selected resistant lines may be released as cultivars
with resistance to FHB or as parent germplasm for the development of high yielding FHB resistant winter wheat cultivars.
