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Hybrid breeding is very successfully performed in many allogamous crops such as maize, sorghum, sugar beet, sunflower and rye (Coors and Pandey 1999). The main advantages of hybrid compared to line varieties are an increased performance for important agronomic traits due to the exploitation of heterosis (East 1908; Shull 1908), a higher yield stability especially in marginal environments (Hallauer et al. 1988) and a higher return on investment for seed companies due to the built-in plant variety protection by inbreeding depression (Edwards 2001). Hybrid breeding in autogamous cereals such as wheat has been less successful compared to allogamous crops because of considerably lower amounts of heterosis, difficulties in implementing a cost-efficient hybrid seed production system and a lower selection gain for hybrid compared to line breeding (Edwards 2001). Recently, large public and commercial …