Identification of the main regulators involved in drought stress tolerance typical of local Tunisian wheat varieties

In a previous study, we were interested to understand the transcriptional programs underlying the phenotypic drought response observed in 9 Tunisian durum wheat varieties a long side the fully genome sequenced Svevo genotype used as a reference. The 9 nine Tunisian durum wheat varieties include two landraces Chili and Mahmoudi, and seven improved lines Khiar, Salim, Maali, Razzek, Karim, Dhahbi and INRAT100. To this end, flag leaf RNA seq experiments were performed where we considered differentially expressed genes (DEGs) as those having |Log2FC| > 1 with a FDR <0.05. Further technical details were previously reported by Djemal et al., 2026 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.03.716342v1). The main regulators responding to drought stress in this core collection of local durum varieties were extracted from the list of the DEGs and are listed in the excel table.