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Genetic and epigenetic modifications to the BBAA component of common wheat during its evolutionary history at the hexaploid level

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Abstract

The formation and evolution of common wheat (Triticum aestivum L., genome BBAADD) involves allopolyploidization events at two ploidy levels. Whether the two ploidy levels (tetraploidy and hexaploidy) have impacted the BBAA subgenomes differentially remains largely unknown. We have reported recently that extensive and distinct modifications of transcriptome expression occurred to the BBAA component of common wheat relative to the evolution of gene expression at the tetraploid level in Triticum turgidum. As a step further, here we analyzed the genetic and cytosine DNA methylation differences between an extracted tetraploid wheat (ETW) harboring genome BBAA that is highly similar to the BBAA subgenomes of common wheat, and a set of diverse T. turgidum collections, including both wild and cultivated genotypes. We found that while ETW had no significantly altered karyotype from T. turgidum, it diverged substantially from the later at both the nucleotide sequence level and in DNA methylation based on molecular marker assay of randomly sampled loci across the genome. In particular, ETW is globally less cytosine-methylated than T. turgidum, consistent with earlier observations of a generally higher transcriptome expression level in ETW than in T. turgidum. Together, our results suggest that genome evolution at the allohexaploid level has caused extensive genetic and DNA methylation modifications to the BBAA subgenomes of common wheat, which are distinctive from those accumulated at the tetraploid level in both wild and cultivated T. turgidum genotypes.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Moshe Feldman of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, for providing the initial seeds of ETW and its common wheat donor. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments to improve the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31290210, 11301064, 31170208) and the Program for Introducing Talents to Universities (B07017).

Conflict of interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Molecular Epigenetics of the Ministry of Education (MOE), Northeast Normal University, Changchun, 130024, China

    Chang Liu, Xuejiao Yang, Huakun Zhang, Xutong Wang, Zhibin Zhang, Yao Bian, Yuzhu Dong & Bao Liu

  2. School of Life Science, Changchun Normal University, Changchun, 130032, China

    Yuzhu Dong

  3. Department of Horticulture, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Bo Zhu

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  1. Chang Liu
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Liu, C., Yang, X., Zhang, H. et al. Genetic and epigenetic modifications to the BBAA component of common wheat during its evolutionary history at the hexaploid level. Plant Mol Biol 88, 53–64 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-015-0307-0

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