High-Resolution Study of Wheat Transcriptomes in response to Drought and Salinity and Ontologies

High salinity and drought are two abiotic stresses which affects both crop growth and yield. To better understand the wheat transcriptional response to salt and drought stress we performed an RNA-seq based transcriptome study of 11 wheat varieties carrying the diploid AA, BB, and DD genomes and the hexaploid wheat genome. Representatives of the hexaploid genome include the T. aestivum varieties; the reference Chinese Spring, and commercially grown varieties developed at Oregon State University. Using the data from the diploid genomes sequenced, we also investigated the expression of known homeolog triplets. Our data suggests that homeologue expression between sub-genomes is not uniform, and that each sub-genome may play a unique role in response to salt or drought stress. By improving wheat genome annotations and discovering shared sets of differential gene expression, the data generated by the study further provides resources for applications in wheat trait improvement.

The presentation will also include insights on the Ontologies for applications and integration in wheat research. We will discuss the progress made in the Planteome Project (www.planteome.org) on common reference ontologies for plant biology.

This research is funded by the NSF awards 1346434 and 1340112.