Genome-wide identification and characterization of Puccinia striiformis-responsive lncRNAs in Triticum aestivum

Wheat stripe rust (yellow rust) caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) is a serious biotic stress factor limiting wheat production worldwide. Emerging evidence demonstrates that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) participate in various developmental processes in plants via post-transcription regulation. In this study, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) was performed on a pair of near-isogenic lines—rust resistance line FLW29 and rust susceptible line PBW343—which differed only in the rust susceptibility trait. A total of 6,807 lncRNA transcripts were identified using bioinformatics analyses, among which 10 lncRNAs were found to be differentially expressed between resistance and susceptible lines. In order to find the target genes of the identified lncRNAs, their interactions with wheat microRNA (miRNAs) were predicted. A total of 199 lncRNAs showed interactions with 65 miRNAs, which further target 757 distinct mRNA transcripts. Moreover, detailed functional annotations of the target genes were used to identify the candidate genes, pathways, domains, families, and transcription factors that may be related to stripe rust resistance response in wheat plants. The NAC domain protein, disease resistance proteins RPP13 and RPM1, At1g58400, monodehydroascorbate reductase, NBS-LRR-like protein, rust resistance kinase Lr10-like, LRR receptor, serine/threonine-protein kinase, and cysteine proteinase are among the identified targets that are crucial for wheat stripe rust resistance. Semiquantitative PCR analysis of some of the differentially expressed lncRNAs revealed variations in expression profiles of two lncRNAs between the Pst-resistant and Pst-susceptible genotypes at least under one condition. Additionally, simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were also identified from wheat lncRNA sequences, which may be very useful for conducting targeted gene mapping studies of stripe rust resistance in wheat. These findings improved our understanding of the molecular mechanism responsible for the stripe rust disease that can be further utilized to develop wheat varieties with durable resistance to this disease

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Not AvailableGenomic selection (GS) has been used globally for increasing agricultural production and productivity. It has been used for complex quantitative traits by selecting breeding material after predicting Genomic Estimated Breeding Values (GEBVs) of target species. The accuracy of GS for estimation of GEBVs depends on various factors including sampling population, genetic architecture of target species, statistical models, etc. The feature (marker) selection is one of the important steps in development of GS models. There are large numbers of models proposed in the literature for GS. However, applicability of these models is based on many factors including extent of additive and epistatic effects of breeding population. Therefore, there is strong need to evaluate the performance of these models and techniques of feature selection under different situations. In this study, performance of linear/additive effect models, viz. linear least squared regression, BLUP, LASSO, ridge regression, SpAM as well as non-linear/epistatic effect models, viz. mRMR, HSIC LASSO have been evaluated through a simulation study in R platform. In general, performance of SpAM was found to be superior for GS than all other models considered in this study in case of presence of additive effect and absence of epistatic effect. However, in case of low heritability and high epistatic effect the HSIC LASSO outperformed all models. This study will assist researcher in selection of appropriate feature selection technique for a given situation.Not Availabl

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Not AvailableGenomic selection is a modified form of marker-assisted selection in which the markers from the whole genome are used to estimate the genomic-estimated breeding value (GEBV). Several estimators are available to estimate GEBV. These estimators are able to capture either additive genetic effects or nonadditive genetic effects. However, there is hardly any procedure available that could capture both the effects simultaneously. Therefore, this study has been conducted to develop an integrated framework that is able to capture both additive and nonadditive effects efficiently. This integrated framework has been developed after evaluating existing additive and nonadditive models for marker selection. Furthermore, two efficient additive and nonadditive methods, that is, sparse additive models (SpAM) and Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (HSIC LASSO), have been combined to select both additive and nonadditive genetic markers for estimation of GEBV. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated on the basis of prediction accuracy, fraction of correctly selected features, and redundancy rate, along with standard error of mean for estimation of GEBV, compared with the individual performances of SpAM and HSIC LASSO separately. The newly developed framework is found to be satisfactory in terms of its performance and found to be robust for estimation of GEBV.Not Availabl

Estimation of Error Variance in Genomic Selection for Ultrahigh Dimensional Data

Estimation of error variance in the case of genomic selection is a necessary step to measure the accuracy of the genomic selection model. For genomic selection, whole-genome high-density marker data is used where the number of markers is always larger than the sample size. This makes it difficult to estimate the error variance because the ordinary least square estimation technique cannot be used in the case of datasets where the number of parameters is greater than the number of individuals (i.e., p > n). In this article, two existing methods, viz. Refitted Cross Validation (RCV) and kfold-RCV, were suggested for such cases. Moreover, by considering the limitations of the above methods, two new methods, viz. Bootstrap-RCV and Ensemble method, have been proposed. Furthermore, an R package “varEst” has been developed, which contains four different functions to implement these error variance estimation methods in the case of Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), Least Squares Regression (LSR) and Sparse Additive Models (SpAM). The performances of the algorithms have been evaluated using simulated and real datasets

Regulatory Networks of lncRNAs, miRNAs, and mRNAs in Response to Heat Stress in Wheat (Triticum Aestivum L.): An Integrated Analysis

Climate change has become a major source of concern, particularly in agriculture, because it has a significant impact on the production of economically important crops such as wheat, rice, and maize. In the present study, an attempt has been made to identify differentially expressed heat stress-responsive long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the wheat genome using publicly available wheat transcriptome data (24 SRAs) representing two conditions, namely, control and heat-stressed. A total of 10,965 lncRNAs have been identified and, among them, 153, 143, and 211 differentially expressed transcripts have been found under 0 DAT, 1 DAT, and 4 DAT heat-stress conditions, respectively. Target prediction analysis revealed that 4098 lncRNAs were targeted by 119 different miRNA responses to a plethora of environmental stresses, including heat stress. A total of 171 hub genes had 204 SSRs (simple sequence repeats), and a set of target sequences had SNP potential as well. Furthermore, gene ontology analysis revealed that the majority of the discovered lncRNAs are engaged in a variety of cellular and biological processes related to heat stress responses. Furthermore, the modeled three-dimensional (3D) structures of hub genes encoding proteins, which had an appropriate range of similarity with solved structures, provided information on their structural roles. The current study reveals many elements of gene expression regulation in wheat under heat stress, paving the way for the development of improved climate-resilient wheat cultivars