Transcriptomics of water-deficit Stress Responses in TAM Wheat Cultivars

Water deficit stress between the booting and grain filling stages significantly affect grain yield and quality of hard red winter wheat. Several stress tolerant cultivars with different adaptation mechanisms have been released and are widely cultivated on the Southern Great Plains of the US. However, the physiological, molecular, and genetic basis of adaptation to drought stress for these cultivars remains unknown. Use of transcriptome profiling to identify drought responsive genes in hexaploid wheat is a challenging process given the quantitative nature of drought stress, genome complexity, and the intricacy of interaction effects. If the information generated from functional genomics studies is to be used in molecular breeding programs for cultivar development, it is highly desirable to use cultivars better adapted for the region. In the current study we used two well-adapted, drought-tolerant, high-yielding, cultivated varieties, TAM 111 and TAM 112, which appear to have different adaptation mechanisms, to identify drought stress induced transcripts during heading and early dough stages. A set of 24 Affymetrix GeneChip wheat genome arrays (2 cultivars; 2 water treatments; 2 sampling stages; 3 biological replicates) from plants subjected to water deficit stress under controlled glasshouse conditions. Differentially expressed genes were identified using a ANOVA (p<0.01) controlling false discovery rate (FDR, q<0.01) using Benjamini Hochberg approach. Total of 24 samples; 2 genotypes * 2 developmental stages * 2 water treatments * 3 replicates