Reproductive Stage Drought Tolerance in Wheat: Importance of Stomatal Conductance and Plant Growth Regulators.

Drought stress requires plants to adjust their water balance to maintain tissue water levels. Isohydric plants ('water-savers') typically achieve this through stomatal closure, while anisohydric plants ('water-wasters') use osmotic adjustment and maintain stomatal conductance. Isohydry or anisohydry allows plant species to adapt to different environments.

Phenotyping reproductive stage chilling and frost tolerance in wheat using targeted metabolome and lipidome profiling.

Introduction: Frost events lead to A$360 million of yield losses annually to the Australian wheat industry, making improvement of chilling and frost tolerance an important trait for breeding.

Objectives: This study aimed to use metabolomics and lipidomics to explore genetic variation in acclimation potential to chilling and to identify metabolite markers for chilling tolerance in wheat.

Methods: We established a controlled environment screening assay that is able to reproduce field rankings of wheat germplasm for chilling and frost tolerance.

Determining the Genetic Architecture of Reproductive Stage Drought Tolerance in Wheat Using a Correlated Trait and Correlated Marker Effect Model.

Water stress during reproductive growth is a major yield constraint for wheat ( L). We previously established a controlled environment drought tolerance phenotyping method targeting the young microspore stage of pollen development. This method eliminates stress avoidance based on flowering time.

Zebularine treatment is associated with deletion of FT-B1 leading to an increase in spikelet number in bread wheat.

The number of rachis nodes (spikelets) on a wheat spike is a component of grain yield that correlates with flowering time. The genetic basis regulating flowering in cereals is well understood, but there are reports that flowering time can be modified at a high frequency by selective breeding, suggesting that it may be regulated by both epigenetic and genetic mechanisms. We investigated the role of DNA methylation in regulating spikelet number and flowering time by treating a semi-spring wheat with the demethylating agent, Zebularine.