Abstract
The old Portuguese wheat landrace aggregate known as 'Barbela' shows good productivity under the low-fertility conditions often associated with acid soils. The use of genomic rye DNA, in combination with 45S rDNA and the repetitive sequences dpTal and pScl 19.2 as probes, in two sequential in situ hybridization steps enabled the identification of all chromosomes in the 'Barbela' wheat lines and the detection of the introgression of rye-origin chromatin onto wheat chromosome arm 2DL in two of the lines. Amplification of microsatellite loci using published primer pairs showed that the distal segment of wheat chromosome 2DL, which was involved in the rye translocation, was deleted. The identification and characterization of small recombinant chromosome segments in wheat-rye lines may allow their use in plant breeding programmes. Their presence in farmer-maintained material demonstrates the importance of maintaining, characterizing, and collecting landrace material before valuable genetic combinations are lost as uniform commercial crops are introduced.
Highlights
IntroductionCommercial palms are F1 hybrids between selections with large thick-shelled kernels (dura) and small shell-less kernels (pisifera), but the hybrids with intermediate kernels (dura × pisifera, known as tenera) may show 50% variation in oil yield
Oil palm is a major crop species producing high quality oil used in many foods
Analysis of the cytosine methylation status of bulk genomic DNA from palm trees and tissue culture material revealed a strong reduction of methylation during tissue culture, seen by digestion with the restriction enzyme McrBC (Figure 1)
Summary
Commercial palms are F1 hybrids between selections with large thick-shelled kernels (dura) and small shell-less kernels (pisifera), but the hybrids with intermediate kernels (dura × pisifera, known as tenera) may show 50% variation in oil yield. In this monocotyledonous species with a single apical meristem, vegetative propagation Extensive research from the 1980s has been successful in setting up and optimising large-scale tissue culture propagation, and plants may be routinely regenerated from cultures initiated from juvenile leaves of adult tenera palms, the ortets. The present study was initiated to examine possible effects on repetitive sequences and genome-wide changes in methylation caused by tissue culture
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