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Author Spotlight: Innovative Approaches to Understanding Plant Structure-Function Relationships for Climate-Resilient Crops

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Diversification of quantitative morphological traits in wheat.

Yixiang Shan¹, Colin P Osborne¹

¹Plants, Photosynthesis and Soil, School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.

Annals of Botany

|January 9, 2024

Summary

Wheat domestication involved significant morphological changes over 10,000 years, with distinct evolutionary paths for different traits. Modern wheat varieties resulted from progressive and punctuated selection events.

Keywords:

Green Revolution Wheats domestication evolution morphology polyploidy selective breeding wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

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Area of Science:

Plant science
Evolutionary biology
Agricultural science

Background:

Crop plant morphology is shaped by domestication through selection.
Wild wheat offers valuable genetic variation for modern breeding.
The precise timing and sequence of wheat domestication traits are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To define the morphospace of wheat at different evolutionary stages.
To understand the morphological trajectory of wheat during domestication.
To identify when key agronomically important traits emerged.

Main Methods:

Grew and measured 142 wheat accessions.
Represented diverse stages of wheat evolution, including three independent domestication events.
Compared morphological traits to define morphospace for each group.

Main Results:

Wild and domesticated wheats occupy overlapping yet distinct morphospaces.
Polyploidization increased leaf and seed biomass, primarily reducing tillers.
Domestication increased leaf and seed size, plant height, and erect architecture, boosting grain yield.
Landrace improvement focused resources on the main stem, increasing stem thickness and flag leaf size.
Green Revolution breeding reduced plant height to enhance harvest index and yield.
Modern wheats exhibit more erect leaves and greater flower biomass than landraces.

Conclusions:

Wheat trait evolution varies: some traits changed progressively (leaf size, grain weight), others punctuatedly (canopy architecture), and some reversed direction (plant height, flower biomass).
Agronomically important traits arose at different stages of wheat's >10,000-year morphological evolution.
Modern wheat is a product of complex, multi-stage evolutionary processes.