Webinar: Interaction between wheat cis- and trans-factors in shaping regulatory networks

Presenter

Yijing Zhang, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Outline

Wheat is one of the most commonly cultivated crops worldwide which has large and complex genomes. The recent release of high-quality wheat genomes and transcriptomes greatly promoted the mechanism study and molecular breeding. Transcriptional regulation is the central component in precise regulation of gene expression, which depends on the interaction between cis-regulatory elements and transacting factors including transcription factors and epigenetic factors. However, the considerable size and complexity of the genomes are major obstacles to dissecting the regulatory specificity. In this webinar, we will present results of our studies in which, based on systematic generation and integration of a series of epigenomes and transcriptomes from a large spectrum of samples, we detected the interactions between cis-and trans-elements on genome-wide scale in regulating tissue specificity, stress responses as well as subgenome diversity.

• We defined and revealed the evolutionary features of the genome-wide cis-regulatory elements based on the epigenomic map in bread wheat.
• We linked thousands of distal cis-regulatory elements to their target promoters, and demonstrated the coordinated interplay between the sequence contexts, epigenetic factors, and transcription factors in regulating subgenome divergent transcriptional responses to developmental and environmental cues.
• We profiled the interaction between cis- and trans-regulatory factors in shaping regulatory networks related to wheat genome evolution and adaptation.

Altogether, these studies provide a wealth of resources for elucidating the wheat regulomics and subgenome-divergent regulation in hexaploid wheat, which are helpful to research of both molecular mechanism and molecular-assisted breeding.

References

• Wang M, Li Z, Zhang Y, Zhang Y, Xie Y, Ye L, Zhuang Y, Lin K, Zhao F, Guo J, Teng W, Zhang W, Tong Y, Xue Y, Zhang Y (2021). An atlas of wheat epigenetic regulatory elements reveals subgenome divergence in the regulation of development and stress responses. The Plant cell, 33(4), 865–881. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koab028
• Jia J, Xie Y, Cheng J, Kong C, Wang M, Gao L, Zhao F, Guo J, Wang K, Li G, Cui D, Hu T, Zhao G, Wang D, Ru Z, Zhang Y (2021). Homology-mediated inter-chromosomal interactions in hexaploid wheat lead to specific subgenome territories following polyploidization and introgression. Genome Biology, 22(1):26 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02225-7
• Li Z, Wang M, Lin K, Xie Y, Guo J, Ye L, Zhuang Y, Teng W, Ran X, Tong Y, Xue Y, Zhang W, Zhang Y(2019). The bread wheat epigenomic map reveals distinct chromatin architectural and evolutionary features of functional genetic elements. Genome Biology, 20(1):139 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1746-8

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