Wang Yajun, Wang Xiaodong, Zhang Lu, Zhakupova Kymbat, Ayala Francisco, Ouyang Yi, Lu Jing, Athiyannan Naveenkumar, Wulff Brande B H, Krattinger Simon G
Plant Science Program, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
State Key Laboratory of Plant Trait Design, CAS Centre for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Nat Commun. 2025 May 28;16(1):4904. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60033-8.
The cloning of disease resistance genes in wheat has been disproportionately slow, tedious and costly because of the large and complex genome. Wheat gene cloning projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s were multi-year endeavors, often spanning a decade or longer. The development of genomics-assisted gene cloning tools and speed breeding have significantly accelerated gene cloning in wheat over the past years. Here, we present an optimized high-throughput disease resistance gene cloning workflow that allows to identify causal genes in less than six months. As a proof-of-principle, we clone the stem rust resistance gene Sr6, which has been a historically relevant source of resistance to confine a major stem rust outbreak in North America in the mid-20 century. Sr6 encodes a CC-BED-domain-containing nucleotide-binding and leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptor. The workflow provides a basis to tackle the systematic cloning of all the genetically described disease resistance genes by the wheat community, which will facilitate knowledge-guided deployment of resistance genes in wheat breeding.
由于小麦基因组庞大且复杂，其抗病基因的克隆工作进展异常缓慢、繁琐且成本高昂。20世纪90年代末和21世纪初的小麦基因克隆项目需要多年努力，往往持续十年或更长时间。在过去几年中，基因组学辅助基因克隆工具的发展和快速育种显著加速了小麦的基因克隆。在此，我们展示了一种优化的高通量抗病基因克隆工作流程，该流程能够在不到六个月的时间内鉴定出致病基因。作为原理验证，我们克隆了抗秆锈病基因Sr6，该基因在历史上是限制20世纪中叶北美一次重大秆锈病爆发的重要抗性来源。Sr6编码一种含有CC - BED结构域的核苷酸结合和富含亮氨酸重复序列（NLR）的免疫受体。该工作流程为小麦研究群体系统克隆所有已遗传描述的抗病基因提供了基础，这将有助于在小麦育种中基于知识指导抗性基因的部署。
