Characteristics Of Ferritin Gene In The Ancestors Of Common Wheat And The Introgression Lines Between Common Wheat And Triticum Dicoccoides

Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides is the donor ancestors of common wheat A and B chromosomes that it has exhibited high protein content and abundant trace element. Common wheat cultivars with high yield but low-nutritional quality characteristics. Therefore, it is of great significance that breeding the wheat varieties with a high nutritional quality and high economic yield through distant hybridization which might combine the good traits of T. dicoccoides and common wheat.In this study, we focused on the cloning and comparative analysis of ferritin gene among different species, including diploid T. urartu, T. boeoticum and T. monococcum of A genome, Aegilops tauschii of D genome, Ae. speltoides of B genome or S genome, and the oldest tetraploid genome T. dicoccoides of AABB genome, in order to understand the source of ferritin gene of common wheat. On the basis, the structural property and relative expression level of ferritin genes in advance lines (>F12) between common wheat cultivar CN16 as female with high grain yield but poor quality and T. dicoccoide as male with high protein, zinc and iron concentration, were further studied. And, the grain zinc, iron and protein content, grain yield in the introgression lines were investigated. Moreover, correlations between the tested traits and analyzed. The objective is to probe the potential effect for wild emmer in nutritional quality improvement of common wheat. The main results are as follows: 1. The ferritin genes from different common wheat genotypes including the cultivar Chuannong16 and the introgression lines between Chuannong 16 and wild emmer, and from different ancestral species of common wheat were cloned. The results showed there was one, two, and three ferritin gene sequences in diploid einkorn wheat (AA) and Ae. tauschii (DD), in tetraploid wheat (AABB), and in hexaploid wheat (AABBDD), respectively. These implied that the three ferritin genes of hexaploid wheat might be derived from A, B and D genome, and ferritin gene of Triticum was a single copy gene.2. In this study, the three kinds of ferritin genes were named as Ferl, Fer2, and Fer3, respectively, which were obtained from different species of wheat. The cloned sequences were 2070bp,2023bp and 2071bp, respectively. The corresponding cDNA lengths were 771bp,768bp and 774bp, encoding 256,255 and 257 amino acids, respectively. The alignment of nucleotide sequences of Ferl, Fer2 and Fer3 with the known ferritin genes in NCBI revealed that they contained 8 exons and 7 introns, and their coding regions were highly homologous, which reflected the ferritin genes in Triticum were very conserved.3. qRT-PCR determination of flag leaf and grain of T. dicoccoides and CN16 and its progeny lines showed that the expression level of ferritin gene in flag leaf and kernel was with significant positive correlation. Ferritin gene expression level was also significantly positively associated with grain protein content, without grain iron and zinc contents. Grain iron content and zinc contents was with significant positive correlation. Significantly negative correlation was observed between ferritin gene expression level and protein content as well as grain weight.