Massive effects on chromatin after ploidy rearrangement in doubled haploids

Abstract

Breeding programmes for major crops, such as maize, wheat, or rice, among others, use doubled-haploid (DH) induction as a strategy to speed up the process to obtain pure homozygous lines. DHs are obtained in two phases: the first one requires the creation of a haploid plant whose chromosomes will be doubled in a subsequent step. However, this constant playing with ploidy levels usually entails substantial changes in the chromatin environment. Now, Piskorz et al. (2023) have demonstrated that indeed both steps produce thousands of changes at the DNA methylation level, most of which occur randomly.