🌾 Durum wheat, the global foundation for pasta production, is highly vulnerable to freezing temperatures. Scientists from Skoltech and their international partners have proposed a solution — new durum wheat lines capable of surviving short-term freezing events while maintaining the grain quality required for premium pasta production. The study is published in Frontiers in Plant Science. With growing climate instability, the risk of freezing damage to durum wheat is increasing. Breeders must preserve the high gluten strength that gives pasta its characteristic texture. To address this challenge, the research team analyzed 250 European accessions, integrating genomic and phenotypic data to identify key genetic regions controlling freezing tolerance and grain quality. “The approach was validated in real breeding populations, where molecular markers from genome-wide association studies were used to identify progeny lines carrying favorable alleles for both freezing tolerance and gluten strength. The results confirmed that the genomic breeding pipeline can successfully combine these traits, providing a scalable strategy for developing climate-resilient durum wheat,” commented Junior Research Scientist Yawar Habib from the Skoltech Biomed Technologies Center, the lead author of the paper, who came to study at Skoltech from India and graduated from the Agrobiotechnologies and Engineering PhD program. The researchers applied genomic selection to predict the performance of breeding lines and model optimal crosses. This represents one of the first implementations of this approach in a practical durum wheat breeding pipeline in Russia. As a result, approximately 60 new lines were selected that combine cold tolerance with superior gluten properties. This work paves the way for developing varieties capable of ensuring stable pasta production under changing climate conditions, and the proposed methodology can also be applied to other crops.