Karyotypic and phenotypic condensation in allotetraploid wheats accompanied with reproductive strategy transformation: from natural evolution to domestication.

Abstract

Main conclusion: Allotetraploid wheat reflects evolutionary divergence and domestication convergence in the karyotypic and phenotypic evolution, accompanied with the transformation from r- strategy to K- strategy in reproductive fitness. Allotetraploid wheat, the progenitor of hexaploidy bread wheat, has undergone 300,000 years of natural evolution and 10,000 years of domestication. The variations in karyotype and phenotype as well as fertility fitness have not been systematically linked. Here, by combining fluorescent in situ hybridization with the quantification of phenotypic and reproductive traits, we compared the karyotype, vegetative growth phenotype and reproductive fitness among synthesized, wild and domesticated accessions of allotetraploid wheat. We detected that the wild accessions showed dramatically high frequencies of homologous recombination and copy number variations of simple sequence repeats (SSR) comparing with synthetic and domesticated accessions. The phenotypic traits reflected significant differences among the populations shaped by distinct evolutionary processes. The diversity observed in wild accessions was significantly greater than that in domesticated ones, particularly in traits associated with vegetative growth and spike morphology. We found that the active pollen of domesticated accessions exhibited greater potential of germination, despite a lower rate of active pollen compared with the wild accessions, indicating a transformation in reproductive fitness strategy for pollen development in domesticated accessions compared to the wild accessions, from r-strategy to K-strategy. Our results demonstrate the condensation of karyotype and phenotype from natural wild accessions to domesticated accessions in allotetraploid wheats. Ecological strategy transformation should be seriously considered from evolution to domestication in polyploid plants, especially crops, which may provide a perspective on the adaptive evolution of polyploid plants.