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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1401135
This article is part of the Research Topic Flourishing in Arid Realms: Exploring the Adaptation of Plant Functional Traits to Drought Environments View all 8 articles

-diketone accumulation in response to drought stress is weakened in modern bread wheat varieties (Triticum aestivum L.)

Provisionally accepted
Aswini Kuruparan Aswini Kuruparan 1Peng Gao Peng Gao 2Raju Soolanayakanahally Raju Soolanayakanahally 2Santosh Kumar Santosh Kumar 3Eliana Gonzales-Vigil Eliana Gonzales-Vigil 1*
  • 1 University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  • 2 Saskatoon Research and Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
  • 3 Brandon Research and Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Brandon, Manitoba, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Cuticular waxes coating leaf surfaces can help tolerate drought events by reducing non-stomatal water loss. Despite their role in drought tolerance, little is known about how cuticular wax composition has changed during breeding in Canadian bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) varieties. To fill in this gap, flag leaves of the Canadian Heritage Bread Wheat Panel, which includes 30 varieties released between 1842 and 2018, were surveyed to determine if and how cuticular wax composition in wheat has changed at two breeding ecozones over this period. Following this, a subset of varieties was subjected to drought conditions to compare their responses. As expected, modern varieties outperformed old varieties with a significantly larger head length and reaching maturity earlier. Yet, when challenged with drought, old varieties were able to significantly increase the accumulation of β-diketones to a higher extent than modern varieties. Furthermore, RNAseq was performed on the flag leaf of four modern varieties to identify potential markers that could be used for selection of higher accumulation of cuticular waxes. This analysis revealed that the W1 locus is a good candidate for selecting higher accumulation of β-diketones. These findings indicate that the variation in cuticular waxes upon drought could be further incorporated in breeding of future bread wheat varieties.

    Keywords: Cuticular waxes, drought, wheat, -diketones, wax biosynthesis. (Min.5-Max. 8)

    Received: 14 Mar 2024; Accepted: 15 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kuruparan, Gao, Soolanayakanahally, Kumar and Gonzales-Vigil. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Eliana Gonzales-Vigil, University of Toronto, Toronto, M5S 1A1, Ontario, Canada

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