Agricultural production is facing serious threat from various biotic and abiotic stresses specifically under climatic challenges. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill global food demand from limited arable land by cultivating modern cultivars with low buffering capacity. Primitive cultivars and landraces are evidently proven to be rich source of genetic variability as against modern cultivated varieties due to thousands of years’ of their cultivation under low input farming systems and extreme environmental conditions. Landraces serve as a potential reservoir of desirable allelic forms of valuable traits and therefore, could help in biodiversity enrichment and subsequently, stabilization of crop production under rapidly changing climatic conditions. Therefore, characterization and evaluation of untapped and unexplored landraces will be beneficial for harnessing genetic variability for economically important traits, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance and other desirable traits including quality, into modern high-yielding cultivars. A large collection of wheat landraces with enormous variability for different traits still remain within genebanks, without being explored for their utility. With the advancement of modern technologies, untapped variation of landraces can be easily made accessible through extensive phenotyping and trait discovery by using high throughput genomics approaches. Use of landraces in crop improvement will facilitate restoration of genetic diversity lost during the course of domestication and will benefit humankind worldwide by ensuring the incorporation of climate resilience and nutritional traits in modern cultivars. This review provides information about the evolution and diversity of wheat landraces and their utilization in wheat improvement for biotic and abiotic stresses and for quality traits.

农业生产正面临来自各种生物和非生物胁迫的严重威胁，特别是在气候挑战下。通过培育缓冲能力低的现代品种来满足全球粮食需求变得越来越困难。与现代栽培品种相比，由于在低投入农业系统和极端环境条件下进行了数千年的栽培，原始栽培品种和地方品种显然被证明是遗传变异的丰富来源。地方品种是有价值性状的理想等位基因形式的潜在储存库，因此可以帮助丰富生物多样性，并随后在快速变化的气候条件下稳定作物生产。所以，对未开发和未开发的地方品种进行表征和评估将有利于将遗传变异性用于经济上重要的性状、生物和非生物胁迫耐受性以及包括质量在内的其他理想性状，用于现代高产栽培品种。大量具有不同性状变异性的小麦地方品种仍然保留在基因库中，没有对其效用进行探索。随着现代技术的进步，通过使用高通量基因组学方法进行广泛的表型分析和性状发现，可以很容易地获得未开发的地方品种变异。在作物改良中使用地方品种将有助于恢复在驯化过程中失去的遗传多样性，并将通过确保将气候适应力和营养特性纳入现代栽培品种而造福全世界。这篇综述提供了有关小麦地方品种的进化和多样性及其在小麦改良中用于生物和非生物胁迫以及质量性状的信息。