Wheat response to winter night warming based on physiological and transcriptome analyses

Abstract

Global warming is primarily characterized by asymmetric temperature increases, with higher temperature rises in winter/spring and at night compared to summer/autumn and daytime. We investigated the impact of winter night warming on wheat leaves using the spring wheat cultivar Yangmai 18 and the semi-winter wheat cultivar Yannong 19 during the 2020–2021 growing season. This study aimed to examine the effect of winter night warming on the top expanded leaf of wheat plants. The results showed that the night mean temperature in the treatment group increased by 1.27°C compared to the ambient temperature and winter night warming increased the yield of both wheat cultivars, the activities of sucrose synthase and sucrose phosphate synthase after anthesis, and the biosynthesis of sucrose and soluble sugars. The differentially expressed genes were identified using P-value<0.05 and fold change>2, and subjected to Gene Ontology annotation and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analyses. The genes differentially expressed in wheat leaves treated with night warming were primarily associated with starch and sucrose metabolism, amino acid biosynthesis, carbon metabolism, plant hormone signal transduction, and amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism. Comparison between groups identified 14 differentially expressed genes related to temperature. These results highlight the effects of winter night warming on wheat development from various perspectives. Our results provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms of the wheat response to winter night warming and the candidate genes involved in this process.