Isabel.Faci-Gomez@jic.ac.uk

Across the world, wheat varieties are sown which are intimately adapted to their environment and growing season. Climate change poses a threat to wheat productivity by modifying the duration of the growing season, determined by the coordination of temperature and photoperiod. While climate change will affect temperatures, photoperiod cycles will remain the same.

Our aim is to understand the mechanisms governing temperature and photoperiod integration in wheat and elucidate how they impact the genetic pathways that coordinate shoot architecture. Shoot architecture is the result of synchronized adjustments in the development and determinacy of shoot meristems and branching patterns. Unlike related species, wheat lacks aerial branching, meaning that each tiller yields a single inflorescence/spike.

We recently observed that a wheat landrace releases aerial branching consistently under higher temperature conditions and UK natural daylength. This suggests that the axillary meristems that would typically be dormant were derepressed under these conditions. To discover the mechanism underlying this unique phenomenon, we are using genetic approaches to identify the causal gene(s) and have performed RNA-sequencing analyses on derepressed and dormant axillary meristems of this landrace. We are combining these approaches with spatial transcriptomics analyses in the aerial branching meristems.

We aim to identify candidate genes which will be functionally validated through genome editing. With this research, we hope to contribute to our mechanistic understanding of the genetic and phenotypic responses of wheat under future climate conditions.

Ultimately, we aim to deploy this knowledge to future proof wheat cultivars to a changing environment.