Allele Mining for small HSP genes in durum wheat by applying different TILLING strategies to increase wheat adaptation to heat stress

The oncoming climate changes are projected to have negative impact on wheat and other crops production (IPCC report 2014), moreover the projection of an increase of 60% of the total food world consumption by 2050 (FAO, 2012) claim for the need of finding new adaptation traits to both abiotic and biotic stresses to be introduced into modern élite varieties. Heat stress is one of the main abiotic stress affecting crop yield and many research efforts are now focused on breeding strategies to improve heat tolerance. Understanding the mechanisms and the genes involved in the thermo tolerance acquisition in wheat is therefore a crucial issue. The HSPs (Heat Shock Proteins) are central effectors and regulators of the plants stress response and within them the low molecular weight HSP (smallHSPs) played an important role allowing the organisms to cope with stress. The photosynthesis is one of the process most affected by heat stress in plants. The chloroplast localized smallHSPs, named TdHsp26, are massively expressed at high temperature and function in the protection of PSII during heat stress. In this work the complete gene sequence of the two homeologous genes TdHsp26-A1 and TdHsp26-B1 have been isolated in durum wheat and a conventional reverse genetic approach of TILLING has been apply to identify mutation in this genes by using the HRM as detection techniques. Moreover taking advantage of the new developed technique of exome capture, a new set of mutants were identify in silico. The development of new genetic KASPar markers, the crossing pipeline and preliminary physiological tests on the mutants will be presented.