Transcriptome association identifies regulators of wheat grain production

Improving grain yield is an aim during crop domestication, and also a major goal of crop breeding. Spike complexity determines the number of seeds per spike, and is a major strategy to improve yield potential. Whereas a large number of inflorescence regulators have been identified in other plant species, we have limited understanding of wheat spike development. In this work, we tried to identified genes or gene regulatory networks, underlying spike architecture, by correlating trait variation with quantitative gene expression variation.