Cheminformatics and Computational Chemical Biology

Biography

Biography: Faheem Shehzad Baloch

Abstract

The Fertile Crescent, particularly southeastern Turkey, is thought to be the primary center of wheat domestication and diversity. In spite of the importance of the genetic diversity from this area, a severe lack of information on the genetic structure of the durum wheat gene pool from this region is evident. For example, thus far, no efforts have been made to understand the genetic structure of the Anatolian durum wheat gene pool, despite its importance in durum wheat breeding. Limited studies have been conducted using genetic resources from Turkey and Syria. However, the landraces evaluated so far represent only a small subset of available resources; furthermore, they come from few geographic regions and do not allow the study of the genetic structure of durum wheat landraces in Turkey and Syria. Diversity Arrays Technology (DArTseq) and SNP marker systems were applied to durum wheat from Central Fertile Crescent countries. We focused on 91 accessions covering the whole geographical regions of Turkey and Syria collected by ICARDA to examine the pattern of variation and to check whether or not diversity in durum wheat is associated with geographical coordinates. Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) is based on genotyping by sequencing technology and is a sequence-independent genotyping method that generates genome-wide genetic fingerprints. Here we used 61K DArTseq markers and 26K SNP to check the phylogenetic relationship and assess the genetic diversity in durum wheat landraces from Central Fertile crescent. It was evident that durum wheat landraces from the same geographical region were often placed in different groups in both neighbor joining analysis and principal component analysis indicating that grouping based on genetic parameters was not closely related to the geographical origin. The population structure was determined by using STRUCTURE software and five populations K=5 were identified among landrace through both marker systems. There was high diversity in durum wheat landraces and we also tested the association of geographical coordinated with both SNP and DArTseq distances and observed that genetic distance is not correlated with geographical coordinates. The wide diversity present in Turkish and Syrian durum wheat landraces could be used as genetic resource in designing breeding program for developing new cultivars adapted to different geographic and climatic conditions, and may also contribute to worldwide breeding programs. We are now using this genotypic data for genome wide association mapping for different traits of interest in durum wheat.