Investigating Triticeae Epigenomes for Domestication

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Michael Bevan; Professor Anthony Hall, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Klaus F.X. Mayer; Professor W. Richard McCombie, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Plant Physiology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263029120

• Final Report Year: 2019

Final Report Abstract

This is a multi-disciplinary project that aims to define the epigenomic landscape of wheat. This work is important because wheat is a key global crop, and like many crop species is a hybrid with three distinctive parents. The genomes of these parents interact to generate new traits not found in the genomes of the separate parents. How these new traits arise in wheat is not known. Forming new wheat hybrids is an increasingly important way to improve wheat varieties, as it rapidly increases the range of genetic variation available for selection. Wheat provides an ideal system to understand how new traits arise in hybrids. DNA modifications such as epigenetic modifications are known to influence many aspects gene expression, gene stability and the formation of new gene structures. In this Project we will build a comprehensive view of the wheat epigenome, how it influences chromatin and gene expression, and how it may be re-shaped during the formation of new hybrids. The outcomes of the Project include new understanding to help guide the choice of parents in making new wheat hybrids, understanding how genomes in hybrids interact to influence gene expression and create new traits.

Publications

• (2015) A genome-wide survey of DNA methylation in hexaploid wheat, Genome Biology, 16:273
  Gardiner LJ, Quinton-Tulloch M, Olohan L, Price J, Hall N and Hall A
  
• (2018). A modified sequence capture approach allowing standard and methylation analyses of the same enriched genomic DNA sample. BMC Genomics, 19(1), 250
  Olohan, L., Gardiner, L.-J., Lucaci, A., Steuernagel, B., Wulff, B., Kenny, J., et al.
  
• (2018). Hidden variation in polyploid wheat drives local adaptation. Genome Research
  Gardiner, L.-J., Joynson, R., Omony, J., Rusholme-Pilcher, R., Olohan, L., Lang, D., et al.
  
• (2019). Integrating genomic resources to present full gene and putative promoter capture probe sets for bread wheat. GigaScience
  Gardiner, L.-J., Brabbs, T., Akhunov, A., Jordan, K., Budak, H., Richmond, T., et al.
  
• (2019). Reduced chromatin accessibility underlies gene expression differences in homologous chromosome arms of hexaploid wheat and diploid Aegilops tauschii
  Lu, F.-H., McKenzie, N., Gardiner, L.-J., Luo, M., Hall, A., & Bevan, M. W.