Multi-omics prediction for yellow rust in bread and durum wheat through conventional and Ai-based frameworks.

Abstract

Yellow rust (YR) is a major threat to both bread and durum wheat production, often causing substantial yield losses. Conventional visual scoring of YR severity, while widely adopted, is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. In this study, we evaluated the predictability (PA), defined as the correlation between predicted and observed values, using genomic and phenomic data for YR severity under multiple prediction scenarios in two biparental wheat populations (bread and durum). YR scoring was conducted on two dates, with YR severity visually assessed while unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) data were collected using a multispectral camera. HTP data were processed to extract spectral wavelengths and vegetation indices (VIs), and all lines were also genotyped using SNP arrays. We tested a diverse set of models, including parametric, machine learning, and deep learning approaches. PA increased markedly when HTP-derived data were used compared with genomic markers alone. For example, support vector regression (SVR) improved from 0.35 (markers only) to 0.87 (wavelengths only). However, integrating genomic and phenomic data did not yield further improvements, as models often plateaued when using HTP-derived features alone. Cross-crop prediction demonstrated promising generalization across bread and durum wheat, achieving PA values up to 0.83. For this last task, best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) and multilayer perception (MLP) consistently provided robust performance across scenarios. These findings highlight the strong potential of UAV-based HTP for rapid, scalable, and accurate prediction of YR severity in wheat. While genomics retains broad utility for breeding, the practical integration of phenomics and AI-driven prediction pipelines will ultimately depend on breeding program strategies, resources, and objectives.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV multispectral HTPによる小麦黄さび病重症度の推定と、複数の予測モデルの比較・検証が研究の中心であり、植物病害状態を直接推定する実質的なフェノタイピング手法研究である。

Code and data availability

The article's Data Availability statement deposits the datasets generated and analyzed in this study (yellow rust phenotyping with UAV spectral data and genomic markers in bread and durum wheat) in the CIMMYT repository under DOI 10.71682/10549375, which is an allowed URL. No author analysis code or trained model is av