Advances in wheat ultra-high yield breeding research enabled by biotechnology and information technology

Global climate change has led to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, including high temperatures, drought, and heavy rainfall, severely disrupting stable crop production. Concurrently, continuous global population growth intensifies food market demand, placing unprecedented pressure on global food security. As one of the most important staple cereal crops worldwide, wheat plays a central role in ensuring food supply, and persistent improvement of wheat yield potential has consistently remained a major long-term objective of modern breeding research. China ranks first globally in both wheat production and consumption; therefore, achieving stable yield increase and quality improvement is crucial to national food security and agricultural sustainable development. Traditional breeding technologies have contributed tremendously to the iterative yield improvement of wheat cultivars across different historical periods and have established a solid foundation for solving food shortage problems. Nevertheless, conventional breeding relies heavily on empirical phenotypic evaluation and artificial field selection, resulting in long breeding cycles, low selection efficiency, and poor predictability of complex quantitative traits. These constraints are insufficient to meet the rigorous requirements for the coordinated improvement of ultra-high-yield potential, stress-resistance, and high quality in modern wheat breeding. To overcome the long-standing bottleneck of stagnant wheat yield improvement caused by the narrowed genetic diversity of modern cultivars, synergistic innovation and breakthroughs of modern agricultural technologies are urgently needed. The integration of cutting-edge biotechnologies, including telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome mining, gene editing, distant hybridization, and genome-wide selection, together with information technologies such as high-throughput phenotyping and artificial intelligence-based predictive models, has become the core driving force to achieve ultra-high-yield breeding goals. This paper systematically reviews the yield potential characteristics and evolutionary trends of wheat cultivars in the core Yellow & Huai River valley wheat-producing region, clarifies the structural optimization pathways underlying ultra-high yield formation, and summarizes the application progress of cutting-edge biotechnologies and digital information technologies in wheat genetic improvement. It further elaborates on the innovative achievements in germplasm resource development, precise trait modification, and heterosis utilization in wheat breeding. Furthermore, this study critically discusses in-depth the current technical bottlenecks limiting breakthroughs in wheat ultra-high yield breeding, as well as future development trends and key research directions of modern wheat breeding within an integrated biotechnology–information technology framework. The relevant results aim to provide a systematic theoretical foundation and practical technical reference for breaking the wheat yield ceiling, developing novel ultra-high-yield wheat varieties, and promoting the sustainable high-quality development of the wheat industry.