2025/10/06 by Benjamen White, Thomas Lux, Rachel Rusholme‐Pilcher +93 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Wheat and Barley Genetics and Pathology #Plant Disease Resistance and Genetics #Plant pathogens and resistance mechanisms
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-64046-1
openalex publication_date 2025/10/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Wheat is the most widely cultivated crop in the world, with over 215 million hectares grown annually. The 10+ Wheat Genomes Project recently sequenced and assembled to chromosome-level the genomes of nine wheat cultivars, uncovering genetic diversity and selection within the pan-genome of wheat. Here, we provide a wheat pan-transcriptome with de novo annotation and differential expression analysis for these wheat cultivars across multiple tissues. Using the de novo annotations we identify cultivar-specific genes and define the core and dispensable genomes. Expression analysis across cultivars and tissues reveals conservation in expression between a large core set of homeologous genes, in addition to widespread changes in subgenome homeolog expression bias between cultivars and cultivar-specific expression profiles. We utilise both the newly constructed gene-based wheat pan-genome and pan-transcriptome, demonstrating variation in the prolamin superfamily and immune-reactive proteins across cultivars.