Samuel.holden@ubc.ca, andrea.gonzalezmunoz@kaust.edu.sa, meng.li@botany.ubc.ca, Mehrdad.abbasi@ubc.ca, jennifer.ens@usask.ca, aachilli@mail.ubc.ca, naveenk2@ualberta.ca, simon.krattinger@kaust.edu.sa, brande.wulff@kaust.edu.sa Curtis.pozniak@usask.ca, gurcharn.brar@ualberta.ca

Wild relatives of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) hold enormous potential for improving agronomic and disease resistance traits in elite wheat cultivars through introduction of novel alleles, and also serve as a platform to explore the natural diversity across the Triticeae. This diversity allows investigation into how important traits may be influenced by genetics. The comparison to the gene pool in cultivated wheat, which has been limited due to population bottlenecks introduced during polyploidization and domestication, underscores the importance of the genetic diversity in its wild relatives for maintaining resilience and adaptability.

Recently, the Open Wild Wheat Consortium (OWWC) assembled the genomes 46 Aegilops tauschii accessions (the progenitor of the hexaploid wheat D genome), with a special emphasis on three diverse lineages: TA10171 ((Lineage 1), TA1675 (Lineage 2), and TA2576 (Lineage 3). We generated comprehensive RNA-Seq data for these accessions using five tissue types: seedling leaf, flag leaf, root, shoot, and inflorescence; in order to perform de novo gene annotation for this pan-genome.

Now, we complement earlier analyses of the genetic diversity exhibited between these lineages by assessing their transcriptomic diversity. This assessment aims to understand how differential gene expression might influence phenotypic diversity and to identify links between transcriptomic regulation and previously identified features such as structural variation between chromosomes or differences in gene content and copy number.

Differential expression of orthologous genes between Aegilops tauschii lineages may provide further insight into the regulation of the D genome in bread wheat which is known to be partially dependent on the content of the A and B genomes, a factor which cannot be captured using solely genomic approaches.