Joint NSF/ERA-CAPS: INTREPID - INvestigating TRiticeae EPIgenomes for Domestication

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PI: W. Richard McCombie (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)CoPI: Robert Martienssen (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) ERA-CAPS Collaborators: Anthony Hall (University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom), Klaus Mayer (Helmholtz-Zentrum Muenchen, Munich, Germany), and Michael Bevan (John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom)Wheat is one of the major food crops in the world and specifically in the United States. This project will take a comprehensive approach to define the epigenome of bread wheat, the functional consequences of epigenetic modifications, how the genome is re-shaped, stabilized and inherited in newly formed hybrids, and how the environment may influence patterns of epigenetic modification. These are fundamentally important questions in biology and are necessary for understanding trait variation in wheat hybrids. It is anticipated that this project will have broad impacts across three specific themes. The first of these relates to food security. Food security is an ever-increasing challenge in the face of factors such as urbanization and world population growth. One factor that significantly affects agricultural yields of bread wheat is the epigenetic regulation of high-yielding hybrid lines. A better understanding of this process will help others understand the basic processes involved in the creation and stabilization of hybrid lines and thus improve the efficiency at which they can be derived and contribute to food security. The second broad area where the work will have significant impacts is in the area of climate change. Understanding how changing climate affects epigenetic regulation of an important crop genome will likely have broad implications for the understanding of how agricultural yields will be challenged and can be modified to respond to changing climate. Lastly the project will have broad impact in the area of enhancing scientific education and understanding. Rapidly advancing science and technology presents a challenge in conveying a general understanding of that technology and the science behind it to the general public. This project will be used as a platform to better explain science to the general public using different and new educational tools. In addition to the training of students, the project will provide summer international exchange research training for graduate students associated with the US-EU consortium.Wheat is a polyploid arising from recent hybridization of goat grass (Aegilops tauschii, DD) with wild tetraploid emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides, AABB) to form hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum AABBDD). This process of hybridization is critical to achieving the high yields produced by modern wheat varieties. However, much is not understood about this process particularly in terms of how epigenetics regulates which parental line is expressed within the agriculturally significant hybrids. This project will generate information about the epigenetic regulation of the bread wheat genome and its role in the stabilization of the component genomes within the hybrids. One aim is to understand how epigenetic variation alters gene expression in hybrid wheat by identifying how epigenetic traits or epigenetic marks are set during hybridization in the formation of new wheat strains and how these are maintained in stable wheat hybrids to allow for high agricultural yields. It is the expectation that this project will provide a much better understanding of the molecular mechanisms related to epigenetics that are involved in the creation and stabilization of high-yielding hybrid wheat strains. All data produced will be freely and continuously shared within the consortium. Specifically, all datasets will be accessible through the iPlant Collaborative and European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) as well as through publicly available data repositories including GenBank.