Genomics of low-temperature tolerance for an increased sustainability of wheat and barley production

Abstract

Stability of high yields in a changing environment becomes the main aim of the future wheat and barley breeding, oriented towards development of frost-tolerant winter and facultative cultivars together with careful selection of growth cycle adaptation and drought tolerance. Since low temperature signal influences both the cold acclimation and vernalization processes the interaction between VRN gene expression and freezing tolerance (FT) is discussed. Recent advances in global expression changes driven by cold are reviewed in view of the immense progress in high throughput technological platforms. Different signal transduction pathways in which several transcription factors play an important role regulating the expression of whole sets of genes are presented, including CBF-regulated and CBF-independent hubs. The knowledge acquired from genomics and transcriptome analysis has been then complemented by the description of metabolomics and proteomic approaches to help unraveling the molecular changes that occur under cold stress in the cereal plants. Finally, it is surveyed the great importance of stable and well-characterized genetic resources for future breeding for FT, that could switch from marker-assisted to genomics-assisted selection.