Abstract
Among the natural mechanisms used for wheat hybrid breeding, the most desirable is the system combining the cytoplasmic male sterility (cms) of the female parent with the fertility-restoring genes (Rf) of the male parent. The objective of this study was to identify Rf candidate genes in the wheat genome on the basis of transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) and paralog analysis data. Total RNA was isolated from the anthers of two fertility-restorer (Primépi and Patras) and two non-restorer (Astoria and Grana) varieties at the tetrad and late uninucleate microspore stages. Of 36,912 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), 21 encoding domains in known fertility-restoring proteins were selected. To enrich the pool of Rf candidates, 52 paralogs (PAGs) of the 21 selected DEGs were included in the analyses. The expression profiles of most of the DEGs and PAGs determined bioinformatically were as expected (i.e., they were overexpressed in at least one fertility-restorer variety). However, these results were only partially consistent with the quantitative real-time PCR data. The DEG and PAG promoters included cis-regulatory elements common among PPR-encoding genes. On the basis of the obtained results, we designated seven genes as Rf candidate genes, six of which were identified for the first time in this study.
Highlights
Common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most important cereals cultivated worldwide because it is a staple food crop [1,2,3]
The sequencing of 24 libraries resulted in 861.3 million raw reads, which included 860.5 million high-quality clean reads
The transcriptomes of fertility-restoring and non-restoring cultivars were compared at the tetrad (T) and at late uninucleate microspore (M) stages
Summary
Common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most important cereals cultivated worldwide because it is a staple food crop [1,2,3]. In recent years, there has been a relatively slow increase in global wheat production (https:// www.statista.com/statistics/267268/production-of-wheat-worldwide-since-1990/; http: //www.fao.org/3/y3557e/y3557e08.htm, accessed on 16 August 2021). The development of hybrid cultivars may increase wheat yields by 10% [4,5,6]. Common wheat undergoes self-pollination, usually involving cleistogamous florets [7,8,9]. The key challenges for breeding wheat hybrids are as follows: modulating floral development and architecture to enable outcrossing, regulating male sterility, and restoring fertility [10,11]
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