Using Advanced Wheat Genomic Resources and Metabolite Fingerprinting to Address Complex Traits

Water availability is a major factor impacting wheat productivity and grain quality. Breeding for yield stability and maintenance of grain quality in water limited environments is challenging due to complex genetic control and difficulty for measuring these traits in a single phenotype. In the “omics” age, where accurate and simultaneous high-throughput phenotyping of multiple traits is possible, opportunities to accelerate genetic gain for complex traits is becoming increasingly tangible. Here, we describe research in which we are applying high-throughput molecular phenomics to investigate yield stability and maintenance of grain quality in water limited environments, and show how recent improvements in the wheat genome sequence are further accelerating our understanding for the genetic basis of these complex traits. We present initial results from a genome wide association analysis (GWAS) of traits contributing to yield stability in a large wheat diversity panel grown under rainfed and irrigated conditions. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy derived grain metabolite fingerprints for each accession clearly differentiated accessions grown in each environment. Metabolite-GWAS identified several loci for differential accumulation of metabolites under water-limited conditions. Further investigation of these loci using the chromosome 7A assembly and gene annotation resources revealed candidate genes for yield stability under drought and grain quality parameters. Our approach is helping to unravel the genetics underlying variation in metabolite profiles and their use for wheat improvement