A Transcriptome Response of Bread Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to a 5B Chromosome Substitution from Wild Emmer

TL;DR

This study examines how bread wheat responds at the gene level when a chromosome is replaced with one from wild emmer wheat.

Contribution

The study reveals a global transcriptome response triggered by a single chromosome substitution in wheat.

Findings

Transcriptome activity sharply dropped before the photoperiod and increased during the night in substituted wheat.

Differential gene expression affected nearly all biological processes but with modest fold changes.

Physiological compensation for the chromosome substitution was mostly satisfactory but not complete.

Abstract

Over the years, alien chromosome substitution has attracted the attention of geneticists and breeders as a rich source of remarkable genetic diversity for improvement in narrowly adapted wheat cultivars. One of the problems encountered along this way is the coadaptation and realization of the genome of common wheat against the background of the introduced genes. Here, using RNA-Seq, we assessed a transcriptome response of hexaploid wheat Triticum aestivum L. (cultivar Chinese Spring) to a 5B chromosome substitution with its homolog from wild emmer (tetraploid wheat T. dicoccoides Koern) and discuss how complete the physiological compensation for this alien chromatin introgression is. The main signature of the transcriptome in the substituted line was a sharp significant drop of activity before the beginning of the photoperiod with a gradual increase up to overexpression in the middle of the night. The differential expression altered almost all biological processes and pathways tested. Because in most cases, the differential expression or its fold change were modest, and this was only a small proportion of the expressed transcriptome, the physiological compensation of the 5B chromosome substitution in common wheat seemed overall satisfactory, albeit not completely. No over- or under-representation of differential gene expression was found in specific chromosomes, implying that local structural changes in the genome can trigger a global transcriptome response.

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