The wild wheat Aegilops tauschii Coss. has extensive natural variation available for breeding of common wheat. Drought stress tolerance is closely related to abscisic acid (ABA) sensitivity. In this study, 17 synthetic hexaploid wheat lines, produced by crossing the tetraploid wheat cultivar Langdon with 17 accessions of Ae. tauschii, were used for comparative analysis of natural variation in d...

Vernalization promotes flowering in winter wheat cultivars, whereas spring wheat cultivars are able to transition from vegetative to reproductive phase without vernalization. The wheat vernalization requirement is mainly controlled by the major locus Vrn-1, an APETALA1/FRUITFULL MADS-box gene homolog. To study natural variation of the vernalization requirement in a wild progenitor of common whe...

Sequencing was used to investigate the origin of the D genome of the allopolyploid species Triticum aestivum and Aegilops cylindrica. A 247-bp region of the wheat D-genome Xwye838 locus, encoding ADP-glucopyrophosphorylase, and a 326-bp region of the wheat D-genome Gss locus, encoding granule-bound starch synthase, were sequenced in a total 564 lines of hexaploid wheat (T. aestivum, genome AABB...

Aegilops tauschii is the D-genome progenitor of hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum). It is considered to be an important source of genetic variation for wheat breeding, and its genome is an invaluable reference for wheat genomics. We conducted a genome-wide association study using 7,185 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers across 322 diverse accessions of Ae. tauschii that were systemat...

The objectives of this study were to clarify the relationship between LMW-GS Glu-D3 gene of Ae. tauschii registered in GenBank and the six Glu-D3 genes including 12 allelic variants of common wheat characterized in our previous studies, and identify novel Glu-D3 genes and haplotypes from Ae. tauschii using gene specific PCR amplification. By searching the NCBI database, 13 LMW-GS genes/pseudoge...

The current limitations in genome sequencing technology require the construction of physical maps for high-quality draft sequences of large plant genomes, such as that of Aegilops tauschii, the wheat D-genome progenitor. To construct a physical map of the Ae. tauschii genome, we fingerprinted 461,706 bacterial artificial chromosome clones, assembled contigs, designed a 10K Ae. tauschii Infinium...

Aegilops tauschii, the D-genome progenitor of Triticum aestivum, encompasses huge diversity for various traits of potential economic importance such as yield, biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, quality and nutrition. In the present study, variation for grain size in Ae. tauschii germplasm was studied and its genetic basis dissected using genome-wide association study (GWAS). Grain length, wid...

Wheat and maize genes were hypothesized to be clustered into islands but the hypothesis was not statistically tested. The hypothesis is statistically tested here in four grass species differing in genome size, Brachypodium distachyon, Oryza sativa, Sorghum bicolor, and Aegilops tauschii. Density functions obtained under a model where gene locations follow a homogeneous Poisson process and thus ...

The D-genome progenitor of wheat (Triticum aestivum), Aegilops tauschii, possesses numerous genes for resistance to abiotic stresses, including drought. Therefore, information on the genetic architecture of A. tauschii can aid the development of drought-resistant wheat varieties. Here, we evaluated 13 traits in 373 A. tauschii accessions grown under normal and polyethylene glycol-simulated drou...

Towards the end of World War II, McFadden & Sears (1946) published a lengthy and classic paper on the origin of hexaploid or bread wheat. In the appendix to this paper they acknowledged that Kihara (1944) had also independently identified Aegilops tauschii (syn. Ae. squarrosa, Tritcum tauschii) as the D-genome donor of bread wheat. Since then, there have been many studies on the taxonomy, biolo...