Neutral molecular markers support common origin of aluminium tolerance in three congeneric grass species growing in acidic soils

Abstract

Aluminium (Al) toxicity is the main abiotic stress limiting plant productivity in acidic soils that are widely distributed among arable lands. Plant species differ in the level of Al resistance showing intraspecific and interspecific variation in many crop species. However, the origin of Al tolerance is not well known. Our most important result is that all Al-tolerant B. hybridum allotetraploid accessions from the western areas of the Iberian Peninsula (areas with acidic soils) have a common origin. Moreover, we have developed several new molecular markers that discriminate very easily among B. distachyon, B. stacei and B. hybridum.

Genetic diversity analysis of some species in Brassicaceae family with ISSR markers

“…These new markers could be used as a molecular tool to discriminate each species from the rest after testing these markers with more accessions from each species. A similar pattern had been described earlier to discriminate Brachypodium distachyon and Brachypodium hybridum species from each other (Contreras et al, 2017).…”

Never the Two Shall Mix: Robust Indel Markers to Ensure the Fidelity of Two Pivotal and Closely-Related Accessions of Brachypodium distachyon

“…It must be noted that these markers are yet to be tested on different populations of the same accession from a wide geographic range, or on other species in the Brachypodium genus. The expectation is that such analyses would yield multiple alleles, as has been shown by other studies [48,50,54]. The in silico sequence analyses showed that some of the regions selected for marker development were distant from areas that could reasonably be considered to be the promoter region for the designated gene (within 2 Kb upstream of the translation start site), and may in fact have been part of the structure of genes in a different orientation (Figure S1).…”

“…Since the inception of B. distachyon as a model system, many tools including markers have been developed to aid in research and discovery. Markers are available for the discrimination of different species in the genus Brachypodium , and within multiple populations of the same species [44,48,49,50,54]. In many cases, the length polymorphisms require the use of high percentage agarose gels.…”

“…This was done to avoid designing primers from gene families which could lead to multiple amplification products. Although there is literature showing that an intron can be used to discriminate within the Brachypodium genus [50], the primers were designed upstream and downstream of the start and stop codons to increase the likelihood of robust and unequivocal results. This approach also increased our understanding of promoter region differences between Bd21 and Bd21-3 that could be exploited in future gene expression variation studies.…”

“…Although, both Bd21, the reference genome accession, and Bd21-3, are distinct inbred lines from the same germplasm source (PI 254867) and are transformable, Bd21-3 has higher transformation efficiencies, and has been used to generate knock-out lines for the Brachypodium scientific community [37,41,42,43]. In addition, many of these investigations have utilized multiple other B. distachyon accessions, as well as markers developed for the discrimination and identification of genetic variation within the Brachypodium genus [44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51].…”