Key message We provide quantitative evidence that rye chromosome arm 1RS exerts background- and context-dependent effects on yield, stability, and grain protein content in contemporary elite winter wheat. Integrated multi-environment analyses demonstrate that translocation lines exhibit pronounced yield stability across 14 contrasting environments, with ‘Insave’- and ‘Petkus’-derived segments contributing through distinct perf...

The widespread occurrence of sex is one of the most elusive problems in evolutionary biology. Theory predicts that asexual lineages can be driven to extinction by uncontrolled proliferation of vertically transmitted transposable elements (TEs), which accumulate because of the inefficiency of purifying selection in the absence of sex and recombination. To test this prediction, we compared genome‐wide TE load between a sexual li...