Wheat yield is determined by three yield components: productive spikes per unit area, KNPS, and kernel weight, determine wheat yield. Among them, the KNPS value has steadily increased, indicating a substantial contribution of increased KNPS to increased wheat yield37, 38. Over the past several decades, numerous QTLs (or genes) for wheat kernel number have been documented based on both linkage-mapping and association-mapping analyses4, 38–54. Some of these studies have also reported QTLs for KNPS on chromosome 4 A4, 40, 44, 50, 51, 53, 54. Based on genetic marker sequence flanking for these QTLs and the recently released WGS assembly, we compared physical positions with qKnps-4A to determine whether they were common interacting QTLs or regions across genetic backgrounds. The results are shown in Supplementary Table S6. qKnps-4A from our previous research shared a confidence interval (4 A:664209916–4 A:736771450) with qKnps-4A in this study (4 A:680398739–4 A:683638403). Interestingly, qKnps-4A has been detected in both the WY and WJ populations (two related RIL populations sharing one common parental line of Weimai 8)4. QKNS.caas-4AL detected by Gao et al.54, also shared a confidence interval (4 A:632 864 778–4 A:688 093 018) with qKnps-4A in our study. These coincidences confirmed the authenticity of qKnps-4A, which should be subjected to fine mapping and map-based cloning in the future. In fact, this work is being conducted based on the secondary mapping population of qKnps-4A’s (data not shown).