Modern wheat breeding selection synergistically improves above- and belowground traits

Therefore, whether and how modern breeding changed the root system remains largely unknown, limiting our understanding of the roles of the root system in the past wheat improvement and how to improve the root system efficiently in the future.In the previous study, we found that modern wheat cultivars (MC) have larger root than landraces (LA) by phenotyping a panel of 406 worldwide accessions (Wang et al., 2022).Here, the root-related traits were normalized with the general linear model to exclude the effects of the kernel weight, and consistent results were observed (Supplementary Fig. S1 and Supplementary Table S1), suggesting modern wheat breeding also changed the belowground traits, albeit indirectly.We then