Abstract
Wheat is one of the main crops bred worldwide. Durum wheat, specifically, is a key element of the Mediterranean diet, representing an élite crop grown in Italy. Durum wheat nutritional and technological values are largely due to the grain protein content (GPC), a complex genetic trait strongly affected by environmental factors and management practices. In the last decades, several breeding programs have been focused on improving GPC by both traditional and innovative approaches. Among seed storage proteins, prolamins, including both gliadins and glutenins, represent the major component. These two classes of proteins are indeed responsible of gluten formation and confer the extensibility and elasticity to the dough. Besides being of crucial importance for both technological properties and rheological characteristics, prolamins, and especially gliadins, have been found to be major triggers for human health, as involved in a number of wheat consumption-related conditions, such as the celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, defined as the onset of a variety of manifestations related to wheat, rye and barley ingestion, and wheat allergies, both due to wheat ingestion or inhalation (of flour or pollen). The identification of loci responsible for the gliadin expression, and particularly of polymorphism in the aforementioned genes, which could result in a lower immunogenic/toxic potential, could be of great importance in breeding programs. For this purpose, we screened a collection of tetraploid wheat genotypes for allelic variants of annotated gliadin genes in the durum wheat genome, in order to identify genetic resources available to breeders to improve wheat nutritional and technological properties. Phylogenetic analysis among different species of Triticum genus and an in silico expression data analysis may also be useful in the exploitation of the complex scenario of gliadin–glutenin interaction and gluten role in the adverse reactions due to wheat consumption.
Highlights
Wheat is one of the most widely grown crop worldwide, providing about 20% of the human daily protein intake
The retrieved gene sequences were blasted against the available dataset of SNP marker sequences (Akhunov et al 2009; Wang et al 2014), as previously reported in other studies (Nigro et al 2017a, b, 2019), and the ones aligned with at least 90% identity were considered as markers within the coding sequences of the gliadin genes
A total of 36 gliadin genes were retrieved from the durum wheat genome browser, Table 1 Gliadin genes IDs retrieved by sequence search in the durum wheat genome browser
Summary
Wheat is one of the most widely grown crop worldwide, providing about 20% of the human daily protein intake. The recently released bread (IWGS 2018) and durum wheat genomes (Maccaferri et al 2019) might be greatly helpful tools in unveiling the complexity of the gluten protein gene families, especially gliadins, as well as their allelic variations, which can strongly affect wheat functional properties and its immunogenic potential and have a huge impact on the development of healthier wheat foods. In this perspective, we analyzed a collection of 240 tetraploid wheat genotypes for SNPs in gliadin-encoding genes in order to find natural allelic variants. The identification of wheat genotypes with lower amounts of toxic epitopes, as well as the less expressed gliadin genes, could be valuable information to be used in new breeding programs and in the development of new detoxification strategies
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