Genomics of Lipid-Associated Traits during Cold Acclimation in Wheat

Lipid composition in plant cells are subjected to a wide range of adjustment when plants encounter unfavorable growth conditions. Great attention has been paid to delineating lipid changes during adaptation to specific stresses, both for seeking novel markers of stress tolerance traits and for exploring the mechanistic details of stress response and adaptation. The level of trans-16:1 fatty acid in phosphotidylglycerol (PG) of cereal leaf tissues during cold acclimation, for example, has been found to be associated with capacity of freezing tolerance. Focusing on two pairs of NILs that differ only in the VRN1 locus, we conducted transcriptomic and lipidomics profiling on leaf tissues under conditions mimicking cold acclimation. We report results of hierarchical clustering of differentially expressed gene (DEG) groups and the correlation of each cluster. To understand the factors responsible for lipid biochemical changes, we performed lipid-transcript network analysis and focused on subnetworks around PG(16:1) for the top 1% of highly weighted network connections between each individual genes and lipids. We will report findings on novel factors that we hope will provide new insights on how environmental factors trigger glycerolipid pathways response during cold acclimation in wheat.