Metabolic and transcriptomic profiling during wheat seed development under progressive drought conditions

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Abstract
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is one of the most important staple foods globally. Drought is a problem to decline wheat yield performance. Although much research has been performed to generate higher yield wheat cultivars, there have been few studies on improving end-product quality under drought stressed conditions, even though wheat is processed into flour to produce bread, noodles, pancakes, cakes, and cookies. Recently, wheat cultivation has been affected by severe drought caused by global climate change. In previous studies, seed shrinkage was observed in wheat exposed to continuous drought stress during seed development. In this study, we investigated how progressive drought stress affected seed development by metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses. Metabolite profiling revealed reduced accumulation of proline and sugar in the drought-sensitive line compared with the water-saving drought-tolerant transgenic line under drought conditions in spikelets with developing seeds. Meanwhile, the expressions of genes involved in translation, starch biosynthesis, and proline and arginine biosynthesis was downregulated in the drought-sensitive line. These findings suggest that seed shrinkage, i.e., endosperm deficiency, occurred because the biosynthesis of seed storage proteins, starch, amino acids, and sugars were inhibited since these ingredients did not accumulate in spikelets. Water-saving drought tolerant trait of wheat could contributes to support seed formation under drought.

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