2nd January 2014. In a review article entitled, “The place of asymmetric somatic hybridization in wheat breeding,” published in the December issue of Plant Cell Reports, Shuwei Liu  and Guangmin Xia have described the method of production of asymmetric hybrids and how such somatic hybrids gave rise to desirable cultivars with respect of drought and salt tolerance out of a substantial number of both symmetric and asymmetric somatic hybrids involving the parental combination of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) and tall wheatgrass (Thinopyrum ponticum). The study revealed that the two genes were inherited from the donor parent and six were derived from point mutations while ten mutations probably resulted from unequal crossing over or DNA replication errors within the wheat HMW-GS sequences. They also noted that three mutations were activated by transposon movement and one probably arose via recombination between two parental genes. The productivity, salinity tolerance and drought tolerance of some somatic hybrids were found to be higher than the parent cultivar.