BackgroundHeat stress at the late reproductive stages is a common problem encountered in autumn-sown wheat production regions in China with the affected area covering as much as two-thirds of the crop. In order to develop wheat cultivars with heat-tolerance, it is crucial to explore favorable alleles for use in breeding programs.ResultsIn this study, we performed a 90K iSelect SNP genotyping assay on a collection of 207 wheat cultivars subjected to heat stress during grain-fill growth stage in three years (2015-2017). Genotypic analyses of 19 phenotypic traits revealed that heat stress had major impacts on grain weight, size, and quality. Correlation analyses indicated that thousand kernel weight (TKW) was significantly correlated with grain width (GW) and grain perimeter (GP), whereas grain protein content (GPC) was negatively correlated with total starch content (TSC) (P <0.01). We applied heat susceptibility indices (HSI) for different traits to assess heat tolerance. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) revealed a total of 125 marker-trait associations (MTAs) at 63 SNP loci on 16 chromosomes each accounting for phenotypic variation (R2) of 3.0-21.4%. 17 loci showed significant associations in three environments. The analysis of selective sweeps indicated that RAC875_c19042_2102 (2B), wsnp_Ex_c257_491667 (3B), wsnp_Ex_rep_c101323_86702413 (5A) and BS00061911_51 (7A) were selected between two subpopulations (top 5%).ConclusionsThese four key MTAs detected in the present study are candidates for further genetic dissection and development of molecular markers.

Polyploidy is an important evolutionary force in plants and may have significant impact on plant breeding. In this study, expression changes between diploid and tetraploid Dioscorea zingiberensis C. H. under control and high temperature conditions were investigated by sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP)-cDNA display approach. Up to 2.7% of the expression changes induced by genome doubling were detected in the tetraploid D. zingiberensis relative to its diploid progenitor. Under high temperature stress, a "random transcriptome response" pattern employed with 6.3% of the expression changes were detected in diploid plants, while, an "activation transcriptome response" pattern developed with 6.9% expression changes were detected in tetraploid plants. This result indicated that there might be ploidy dependent pattern of transcriptomic response to high temperature environment, which might contribute to the evolutionary success of polyploids.

Authors' Contribution MUA designed the study, conducted the surveys, executed experimental work and prepared the manuscript. SAK supervised the work. NJ provided technical assistance. AUM analyzed the data.