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Updated: Mar 29, 2026
Determination of DNA Methylation of Imprinted Genes in Arabidopsis Endosperm
Published on: January 28, 2011
A genome-wide survey of DNA methylation in hexaploid wheat
Laura-Jayne Gardiner1, Mark Quinton-Tulloch2, Lisa Olohan3
1Institute of Integrative Biology, University of Liverpool, Crown Street, Liverpool, UK. lgardine@liv.ac.uk.
Background:
DNA methylation is an important mechanism of epigenetic gene expression control that can be passed between generations. Here, we use sodium bisulfite treatment and targeted gene enrichment to study genome-wide methylation across the three sub-genomes of allohexaploid wheat.
Results:
While the majority of methylation is conserved across all three genomes we demonstrate that differential methylation exists between the sub-genomes in approximately equal proportions. We correlate sub-genome-specific promoter methylation with decreased expression levels and show that altered growing temperature has a small effect on methylation state, identifying a small but functionally relevant set of methylated genes. Finally, we demonstrate long-term methylation maintenance using a comparison between the D sub-genome of hexaploid wheat and its progenitor Aegilops tauschii.
Conclusions:
We show that tri-genome methylation is highly conserved with the diploid wheat progenitor while sub-genome-specific methylation shows more variation.
