Abstract
Transposable elements (TEs) are major contributors to genome plasticity and thus are likely to have a dramatic impact on genetic diversity and speciation. Recent technological developments facilitated the sequencing and assembly of the wheat genome, opening the gate for whole genome analysis of TEs in wheat, which occupy over 80% of the genome. Questions that have been long unanswered regarding TE dynamics throughout the evolution of wheat, are now being addressed more easily, while new questions are rising. In this review, we discuss recent advances in the field of TE dynamics in wheat and possible future directions.
Highlights
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is a relatively young allohexaploid species, which has been generated by two subsequent allopolyploidization events that followed the divergence of three diploid wild ancestors: Triticum urartu, a species from section Sitopsis, a relative of today’s Aegilops speltoides and Aegilops tauschii (Feldman and Levy, 2012; Pont et al, 2019)
Keidar-Friedman et al (2018) suggested that the relatively low proportion of common insertions might be the result of speciesspecific activity in wild emmer or in bread wheat following hexaploidization and might involve different genomic rearrangements including the deletion of Transposable elements (TEs) containing sequences
While the mountain range formation explanation fits the results, we suggest that amplification bursts cannot be ruled out as a possible explanation for the observed TE dynamics
Summary
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is a relatively young allohexaploid species, which has been generated by two subsequent allopolyploidization events that followed the divergence of three diploid wild ancestors: Triticum urartu (donor of the A genome), a species from section Sitopsis, a relative of today’s Aegilops speltoides (donor of the B genome) and Aegilops tauschii (donor of the D genome) (Feldman and Levy, 2012; Pont et al, 2019). Similar TE composition as in bread wheat genome was observed in the rest of the sequenced Triticum and Aegilops species from different ploidy levels (Avni et al, 2017; Luo et al, 2017; Keidar-Friedman et al, 2018; Ling et al, 2018; Maccaferri et al, 2019).
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