Fusarium head blight is a devastating wheat disease that causes yield reduction and mycotoxins contamination, leading to multiple negative consequences for the economy, health, and food safety. Despite the tremendous efforts that have been undertaken over the last several decades to harness the disease, the problem remains a challenging issue. Due to global warming, its impact has become increasingly severe in Baltic and Nordic countries. The improvement of wheat resistance is hampered by complicated genetic inheritance, the scarcity of adapted resistant breeding materials, and difficulties in obtaining accurate and reproducible data due to the high interaction and dependency of the disease development on the environment. In this study, the resistance of 335 genotypes, 9 of which were of exotic origin and the remainder of which were adapted to the environments of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or Norway, was studied in 8 trials using spray and point inoculation with spore suspensions and grain spawn inoculation under field and/or greenhouse conditions. The best linear unbiased estimates (BLUEs) of each genotype within the individual trials and the adjusted means across the trials were determined to reduce the environmental effects. Genotypes that exhibited excellent Type I or Type II resistance and overall resistance were identified.

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a serious concern for wheat production worldwide. The current study was conducted to identify morpho-phenological traits that contribute to passive resistance against FHB. For this purpose, a set of 332 spring wheat genotypes from different origins was used. Eight morpho-phenological traits and FHB severity were evaluated using spray inoculation under field conditions in 2022 and 2023. A non-parametric test was performed to evaluate genotypic variation for all studied traits, revealing significant differences among genotypes across the two years. Correlation analysis demonstrated a strong negative association between FHB severity and phenological traits: days to heading (r = −0.43, p < 0.001), days to flowering (r = −0.39, p < 0.001) and a low to medium negative correlation between FHB resistance and spike length (r = −0.29, p < 0.001) and spikelets per spike (r = −0.26, p < 0.001) on average across two years. Furthermore, there was a significant negative but weak association between anther extrusion and FHB severity (r = −0.21, p < 0.001). Random forest regression analysis demonstrated that a complex of eight morpho-phenological traits predicted FHB severity with an accuracy of 65% in 2023 and 57% in cross-validation sets across two years. According to permutation importance analysis, days to flowering, heading, and anther extrusion had the highest contribution to FHB severity, and all three traits had a significant effect on FHB prediction.

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a serious concern for wheat production worldwide. The current study was conducted to identify morpho-phenological traits that contribute to passive resistance against FHB. For this purpose, a set of 332 spring wheat genotypes from different origins was used. Eight morpho-phenological traits and FHB severity were evaluated using spray inoculation under field conditions in 2022 and 2023. A non-parametric test was performed to evaluate genotypic variation for all studied traits, revealing significant differences among genotypes across the three years. Correlation analysis demonstrated a strong negative association between phenological traits and FHB severity and a low to medium negative correlation between spike length, spikelets per spike, and FHB resistance. Furthermore, there was a significant negative but weak association between anther extrusion and FHB severity. Random forest regression analysis demonstrated that a complex of eight morpho-phenological traits predicted FHB severity with an accuracy of 65% in 2023 and 57% across two years. According to permutation importance analysis, days to flowering, heading, and anther extrusion had the highest contribution to FHB severity, and all three traits had a significant effect on FHB prediction.