Population Genomics and Association Mapping of Disease Resistance Genes in Israeli Populations of Wild Relatives of Wheat, Triticum dicoccoides and Aegilops speltoides
Authors: Breiman Adina , Dvorak Jan , Korol Abraham , Akhunov Eduard 
Published: March 2022

Wheat is the most widely grown crop on earth, together with rice it is second to maize in total global tonnage. One of the emerging threats to wheat is stripe (yellow) rust, especially in North Africa, West and Central Asia and North America. The most efficient way to control plant diseases is to introduce disease resistant genes. However, the pathogens can overcome rapidly the effectiveness of these genes when they are wildly used. Therefore, there is a constant need to find new resistance genes to replace the non-effective genes. The resistance gene pool in the cultivated wheat is depleted and there is a need to find new genes in the wild relative of wheat. Wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoides) the progenitor of the cultivated wheat can serve as valuable gene pool for breeding for disease resistance. Transferring of novel genes into elite cultivars is highly facilitated by the availability of information of their chromosomal location. Therefore, our goals in this study was to find stripe rust resistant and susceptible genotypes in Israeli T. dicoccoides population, genotype them using state of the art genotyping methods and to find association between genetic markers and stripe rust resistance. We have screened 129 accessions from our collection of wild emmer wheat for resistance to three isolates of stripe rust. About 30% of the accessions were resistant to one or more isolates, 50% susceptible, and the rest displayed intermediate response. The accessions were genotyped with Illumina'sInfinium assay which consists of 9K single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. About 13% (1179) of the SNPs were polymorphic in the wild emmer population. Cluster analysis based on SNP diversity has shown that there are two main groups in the wild population. A big cluster probably belongs to the Horanum ssp. and a small cluster of the Judaicum ssp. In order to avoid population structure bias, the Judaicum spp. was removed from the association analysis. In the remaining group of genotypes, linkage disequilibrium (LD) measured along the chromosomes decayed rapidly within one centimorgan. This is the first time when such analysis is conducted on a genome wide level in wild emmer. Such a rapid decay in LD level, quite unexpected for a selfer, was not observed in cultivated wheat collection. It indicates that wild emmer populations are highly suitable for association studies yielding a better resolution than association studies in cultivated wheat or genetic mapping in bi-parental populations. Significant association was found between an SNP marker located in the distal region of chromosome arm 1BL and resistance to one of the isolates. This region is not known in the literature to bear a stripe rust resistance gene. Therefore, there may be a new stripe rust resistance gene in this locus. With the current fast increase of wheat genome sequence data, genome wide association analysis becomes a feasible task and efficient strategy for searching novel genes in wild emmer wheat. In this study, we have shown that the wild emmer gene pool is a valuable source for new stripe rust resistance genes that can protect the cultivated wheat.