Transcriptomic atlas of the durum wheat plant development

It originates from BBAA wild tetraploid domesticated in Neolithic era, later evolving to domesticated emmer and then to up to 11 T. turgidum subspecies, including durum wheat landraces and modern cultivars. Tetraploid wheat is the donor of the A and B genomes of hexaploid bread wheat (DDAABB), representing therefore a valuable source of genetic variability and beneficial alleles for both durum and bread wheat breeding.

After assembling the Platinum-quality reference genome for Svevo durum wheat cultivar coupling PACBIO HiFi long read 35X sequencing with BIONANO Optical Mapping and Hi-C conformation capture, a complete and accurate gene annotation was then obtained by coupling Illumina RNASeq and Nanopore Isoseq sequencing from multiple tissues. The expression of 68,154 high confidence genes together with more than 100,000 low confidence, TE-related or long non-coding genes was investigated on 30 diverse tissues from grain, root, leaf, and spike samples across multiple developmental time points to create a transcriptional atlas of durum wheat development.