After  the  first  reports on  spontaneous  wheat-rye chromosome substitutions 5R(5A) by Katterman (1937), O'Mara (1946) and Riley and Chapman (1958), during the past three decades  particularly, 1R(1B) substitutions and 1RS.1BL translocations were described in more  than 650  cultivars  of wheat  from all over  the  world (Blüthner  and  Mettin 1973; Mettin et al.  1973;  Zeller  1972; Zeller  1973;  Zeller and Fischbeck 1971). Even recent surveys show that sometimes more than 45 % of breeding material may contain those translocations (Zhou et al. 2007) or 55% of CIMMYT bread wheat germplasm. This translocation has been deemed so important that it has been incorporated into >60 wheat varieties, including the prominent “Veery” spring wheat lines, that occupy >50% of all developing country wheat area, almost 40 million hectares.

Their  most  important phenotypic deviation from common wheat cultivars is the so-called wheat-rye resistance, i. e. the presence of wide-range resistance to  races  of powdery mildew and rusts (Bartos  and Bares  1971; Zeller 1973), which is linked with decreased breadmaking  quality (Zeller  et  al. 1982), good ecological adaptability  and yield performance Rajaram et al. 1983; Schlegel and Meinel 1994, Singh et al. 2008).