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First published online November 14, 2008; 10.1104/pp.108.129734 Plant Physiology 149:258-270 (2009) © 2009 American Society of Plant Biologists OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE
Analysis of Intraspecies Diversity in Wheat and Barley Genomes Identifies Breakpoints of Ancient Haplotypes and Provides Insight into the Structure of Diploid and Hexaploid Triticeae Gene Pools1,[OA]Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zurich, 8008 Zurich, Switzerland (T.W., S.G.K., L.R., B.K.); Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Plant Industry, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia (E.S.L.); National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Tsukuba 305–8602, Japan (T.K., M.P., T.M.); Cereal Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2M9 (S.C.); Institute of Society for Techno-Innovation of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, Tsukuba 305–0854, Japan (H.K.); Research Institute for Bioresources, Okayama University, Okayama 710–0046, Japan (K.S.); and Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, D–06466 Gatersleben, Germany (D.P., N.S.)
A large number of wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) varieties have evolved in agricultural ecosystems since domestication. Because of the large, repetitive genomes of these Triticeae crops, sequence information is limited and molecular differences between modern varieties are poorly understood. To study intraspecies genomic diversity, we compared large genomic sequences at the Lr34 locus of the wheat varieties Chinese Spring, Renan, and Glenlea, and diploid wheat Aegilops tauschii. Additionally, we compared the barley loci Vrs1 and Rym4 of the varieties Morex, Cebada Capa, and Haruna Nijo. Molecular dating showed that the wheat D genome haplotypes diverged only a few thousand years ago, while some barley and Ae. tauschii haplotypes diverged more than 500,000 years ago. This suggests gene flow from wild barley relatives after domestication, whereas this was rare or absent in the D genome of hexaploid wheat. In some segments, the compared haplotypes were very similar to each other, but for two varieties each at the Rym4 and Lr34 loci, sequence conservation showed a breakpoint that separates a highly conserved from a less conserved segment. We interpret this as recombination breakpoints of two ancient haplotypes, indicating that the Triticeae genomes are a heterogeneous and variable mosaic of haplotype fragments. Analysis of insertions and deletions showed that large events caused by transposable element insertions, illegitimate recombination, or unequal crossing over were relatively rare. Most insertions and deletions were small and caused by template slippage in short homopolymers of only a few base pairs in size. Such frequent polymorphisms could be exploited for future molecular marker development.
The Triticeae tribe contains some of the world's most important crops, among them wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). Wheat and barley diverged approximately 11.6 million years ago (MYA) and have further diversified since then into several subspecies (Chalupska et al., 2008  ). Modern bread wheat has a hexaploid genome with A, B, and D genomes resulting from hybridization. The first hybridization event combined the genomes of the wild wheat species Triticum urartu (A genome) and a probably extinct close relative of Aegilops speltoides (B genome) into the tetraploid Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccoides (Feldman, 2001). Much more recently, approximately 10,000 years ago, a second polyploidization event with the diploid Aegilops tauschii gave rise to hexaploid wheat T. aestivum (Feldman, 2001). This second hybridization occurred in the early stages of human agriculture. A recent study revealed lower levels of polymorphism in the D genome than in the A and B genomes, indicating that later gene flow from tetraploid to hexaploid species was frequent, while it was very limited between the diploid Ae. tauschii and hexaploid wheat (Chao et al., 2009).
In contrast to wheat, barley is a diploid species and there is evidence for extensive gene flow from wild to cultivated forms (Pickering and Johnston, 2005
Intraspecific variation at the haplotype level has been studied to varying degrees in different plant species. The most comprehensive data are available for Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), in which oligonucleotide resequencing arrays allowed comparison of multiple ecotypes at the whole-genome level (Clark et al., 2007
The high repeat content of more than 80% (Bennett and Smith, 1976
The studies cited above were focused on genes in the A genome, which, as part of tetraploid wheat, has been part of the polyploid wheat gene pool for a long time. The Lr34 locus, which is described in this study, is located on the D genome. This genome is the most recent addition to hexaploid wheat and therefore shows the lowest degree of polymorphism. Two recent studies showed a surprisingly high level of polymorphism between the D genome of hexaploid wheat and the diploid wheat Ae. tauschii, suggesting that the Ae. tauschii line that was used to produce the respective BAC library had diverged at least 1 MYA from the donor of the D genome (Chantret et al., 2005
Divergence times of sequences from different species (or varieties) can be estimated based on the number of nucleotide substitutions in intergenic regions. Triticeae species are especially suited for such analyses because of their high TE content. TEs and other intergenic regions are believed to be largely free from selection pressure (Petrov, 2001
When sequences diverge over time, they accumulate not only nucleotide substitutions but also insertions and deletions (InDels). In Triticeae, the most prominent source of insertions are TEs, which can change the size and sequence organization of a genomic region dramatically within a relatively short evolutionary time (SanMiguel et al., 2002 Here, we present a comparative analysis of the levels of intraspecific variation in two barley loci, Vrs1 and Rym4, and the wheat locus Lr34. The Vrs1 locus regulates spike morphology in barley, whereas Rym4 and Lr34 are involved in disease resistance. For the Rym4 and Lr34 loci, we had sequences from three varieties, and for Vrs1, we had sequences from two. Additionally, we analyzed the Lr34 locus in the diploid Ae. tauschii. At two of the studied loci, we found ancient haplotype fragments in the otherwise highly conserved sequences. We identified several major sequence differences that were caused by illegitimate recombination and unequal crossing over. Additionally, we found that template slippage in short homopolymers is the major source of small InDels in closely related sequences.
For our comparative analyses of intraspecific genome variability, we used large genomic sequences from the two barley loci Vrs1 (Komatsuda et al., 2007 ) and Rym4 (Stein et al., 2005; Wicker et al., 2005). For the former, sequences from the varieties Morex and Haruna Nijo were used, while for the latter, sequences from three varieties (Morex, Haruna Nijo, and Cebada Capa) were studied. These three barley varieties have very different breeding histories and pedigrees with probably very little overlap in modern breeding history. Morex is an elite breeding line mostly derived from the North American gene pool (http://genbank.vurv.cz/barley/pedigree/krizeni3.asp?id=‘1488’). Cebada Capa is an old breeding line from Argentina from around the year 1920 (Grando and Macpherson, 2005), whereas Haruna Nijo was released from Sapporo Brewery in Japan in 1981 (Saisho et al., 2007). In wheat, we studied sequences from three varieties, Chinese Spring, Renan, and Glenlea, as well as from the diploid donor of the D genome, Ae. tauschii (accession AL8/78). The three hexaploid wheat lines analyzed originate from very different gene pools: Chinese Spring is an old landrace from China, whereas Glenlea is a Canadian line with a very complex pedigree based on mostly International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and North American material (http://genbank.vurv.cz/wheat/pedigree/krizeni3.asp?id=‘19332’). Finally, Renan is a French winter wheat representing elite wheat material with a pedigree mostly based on European lines (http://genbank.vurv.cz/wheat/pedigree/krizeni1_n.asp?oper=Like&name=Renan&acc=name). The sequences from wheat and from the barley varieties Haruna Nijo and Cebada Capa are made public here, to our knowledge, for the first time. The two barley loci contain two putative genes each, while the wheat Lr34 locus contains eight genes (Table I
).
The Barley Varieties Morex and Haruna Nijo Are Very Similar in Genomic Organization at the Vrs1 Locus But Show Hundreds of Sequence Differences
The recently published sequence of the Vrs1 locus from the barley variety Morex (Komatsuda et al., 2007
The two sequences contain a total of 61 InDels; 34 of them are deletions in the Morex sequence and 27 are deletions in the Haruna Nijo sequence. The vast majority (54) of them are InDels of 10 bp or less, while large InDels are rare. Thirty-five of them are 1-bp InDels. To get clues to the molecular mechanism that caused the InDels, we analyzed the surrounding sequences of all 61 InDels (Table II ). We found that template slippage is in 49 cases the most frequent cause for InDels in the sequence analyzed. We considered template slippage as the molecular mechanism whenever the inserted/deleted sequence was found duplicated or multiplied in its entirety in the immediately neighboring sequences; for example, when an InDel motif GGA is embedded in a GGA microsatellite sequence (Fig. 1B). The largest InDel we attributed to template slippage is 14 bp in size. The 14-bp motif is one unit of a tandem array of five and four units in Haruna Nijo and Morex, respectively (Fig. 1B). For five InDels ranging in size from 6 to 390 bp, we could identify short direct repeats flanking the breakpoints of the InDels and indicating illegitimate recombination as the molecular mechanism (Fig. 1C). The most striking differences in size between the two sequences were apparently caused by unequal crossing over. In one large event, the internal domain of an RLC_BARE1 element was eliminated in the Morex sequence (see below). The second event resulted in the presence/absence of two 70-bp units in a large tandem repeat array (Fig. 1D). For four InDels, it is not clear by which mechanism they were caused.
Comparison of Three Barley Varieties at the Rym4 Locus Reveals a Breakpoint between Two Ancient Haplotypes The three genomic sequences that cover the barley Rym4 locus from the three varieties Morex, Haruna Nijo, and Cebada Capa have a common overlap of approximately 87 kb. This region is highly repetitive and contains only two genes (EIF4E-1 and MCT-1; Table I), which are located tail to tail immediately adjacent to each other and are surrounded by a large number of transposable elements (Fig. 1E). Haruna Nijo and Cebada Capa are very similar to each other in the Rym4 region, as they show only 70 nucleotide substitutions and 28 InDels in a total of 92,305 aligned bases. Twenty-one InDels can be attributed to template slippage in SSRs. For six of them, the mechanism is unclear, and in one case, an unequal crossing-over event led to the expansion of a direct repeat array by two units in Haruna Nijo (Table II). Excluding the region containing the two genes plus 1 kb of upstream and downstream region, a total of 81,760 bp could be aligned. This fraction contains 69 nucleotide substitutions, corresponding to an estimated divergence time of 32,478 ± 3,525 years ago. The comparison of Morex and Haruna Nijo yielded much more complex results, indicating that the Rym4 locus of Morex is the most divergent of the three. At the level of sequence organization, Morex and Haruna Nijo differ in numerous InDels (Fig. 1E). The Morex sequence contains eight TEs that are absent in Haruna Nijo, while the latter contains two specific TEs (Fig. 1E). Three of the additional TEs in Morex are nested in other TEs (Fig. 1E). There are seven full-length retrotransposons for which the insertion times could be estimated. Only one of them is common to both sequences and was inserted approximately 1.87 MYA. The other six, which are all only present in the Morex sequence, were inserted between 0.87 and 0.05 MYA (Fig. 1E). These data imply that the two loci diverged sometime between 1.87 and 0.87 MYA, the time span between the youngest retrotransposon common to both and the oldest one that appears in only one variety. We studied the distribution of nucleotide substitutions between the loci by excising in silico from both sequences those regions (TEs and other InDels) that are present in only one of the two. This resulted in a hypothetical ancestor sequence that contains only those regions that are found in both varieties (Fig. 1E). Interestingly, SNP frequency in the left part of the sequence is more than five times higher than in the right part. The first approximately 25 kb of the sequence has an average of 23.7 SNPs per 1,000 bp. This value drops abruptly to 4.1 SNPs per 1,000 bp between positions 25,000 and 26,000 and remains at this low level for the rest of the sequence (Fig. 1E). We interpret this drop in SNP frequency as the breakpoint of two ancient haplotypes that were recombined in Morex but not in Haruna Nijo. When the TE fractions of the strongly conserved and the less conserved parts were used separately for molecular dating, their estimated divergence times were 159,621 ± 10,335 and 927,306 ± 39,229 years ago, respectively. Based on these numbers, we developed a model of the evolution of the two varieties (Fig. 1F). We propose that two different barley lineages diverged approximately 930,000 years ago, giving rise to the two different haplotypes 1 and 2. This divergence time estimate is based on the number of nucleotide substitutions found in the 25 kb at the left end of the hypothetical ancestor sequence. The lineages giving rise to Haruna Nijo and part of the Morex sequence diverged approximately 160,000 years ago (based on nucleotide substitutions on the right part of the sequence). The lineage leading to Morex later recombined with haplotype 2, resulting in a chimerical sequence that includes regions from both haplotypes. The breakpoint of the recombination event lies 3 to 5 kb upstream of the HvEIF4E-1 gene (Fig. 1E). The results of the comparison of Morex and Cebada Capa were basically identical, because Cebada Capa and Haruna Nijo are much more similar to each other at the Rym4 locus than to Morex (data not shown).
The largest wheat sequence we analyzed has a size of 207 kb, derived from the Lr34 locus of the hexaploid wheat variety Chinese Spring. The sequence contains eight genes, including one conserved noncoding sequence and one pseudogene (CYP-1; Table I), which was disrupted by the insertion of a DNA transposon of the Harbinger superfamily (Fig. 2 ). This sequence was compared with two sequences from the varieties Glenlea and Renan. The Glenlea sequence has a size of 147 kb and covers all of the right part of the Chinese Spring sequence but does not cover the first approximately 60 kb at the left end (Fig. 2). The Chinese Spring and Glenlea sequences are extremely similar to each other. Neither contains a major insertion or deletion that would clearly distinguish it from the other, and we detected a single nucleotide substitution that was confirmed by resequencing in 146,245 aligned bases. When all gene sequences (plus 1 kb of upstream and downstream regions) were removed from the alignment, 107,182 bp were left for a divergence time estimate. Using this figure, the two sequences were estimated to have diverged roughly within the past 700 years (359 ± 359 years). In contrast to the low number of SNPs, a total of 30 InDels were found. Twenty-eight of them are due to template slippage, one to unequal crossing over, and one has no clear cause.
Renan, at 91 kb, is the shortest sequence that was available. It is completely covered by the Chinese Spring sequence but overlaps in only 42 kb with the sequence of Glenlea (Fig. 2A). In total, we could align 81,862 bp between Chinese Spring and Renan and found 13 nucleotide substitutions. The Renan sequence contains four putative genes (total gene space of 27.2 kb, including 1 kb of upstream and downstream sequences). Nine nucleotide substitutions were found in the 54.6 kb of nongenic sequence, translating into a divergence time estimate of 6,339 ± 2,113 years ago.
We detected a total of 26 InDels between Renan and Chinese Spring and six InDels between Renan and Glenlea. All except two can be attributed to template slippage. The two other InDels are the products of illegitimate recombination. The main difference is a large 9.8-kb deletion affecting parts of an RLC_Angela retrotransposon plus part of its flanking region. The deletion is present in Glenlea and Chinese Spring, while Renan still contains the 9.8-kb fragment. In this respect, Renan is more similar to Ae. tauschii, which also does not contain that deletion (InDel
The Ae. tauschii sequence has a size of 180 kb and is completely covered by the Chinese Spring sequence. It contains one sequence gap of unknown size in a CACTA transposon of the TAT1 family (Fig. 2), but the order of the two sequence contigs could be inferred based on the alignment with the Chinese Spring sequence. Ae. tauschii, although overall similar, shows several major differences from the hexaploid wheat sequences. These differences include the insertions of two CACTA transposons and a non-LTR retrotransposon in hexaploid wheat (InDels Interestingly, the Ae. tauschii sequence also shows an uneven distribution of nucleotide substitutions, similar to the barley haplotypes described above: a large region of approximately 80 kb in the left half of the sequence is highly conserved between hexaploid wheat (i.e. Chinese Spring) and Ae. tauschii (Fig. 2B), as the two species differ in only 87 nucleotide positions. This region includes three of the genes and one non-LTR retrotransposon. However, the situation is more complex than at the barley Rym4 locus and more difficult to interpret. From the SNP density plot (Fig. 2B), it appears that there are at least three different levels of sequence conservation: a highly conserved region in the left half (region A), a highly variable segment in the middle (region D), and intermediate conservation in the center and the right half of the sequence (regions B and E). We interpret these data as combinations of at least two, maybe three, haplotypes of different ages. The exact breakpoints could not be determined, but one appears to be close to the LRK-1 gene (border between regions A and B, Fig. 2B). Comparisons of nongenic sequences to the left of that island produced divergence time estimates of roughly 57,000 years ago, while those to the right of it indicated a divergence time of approximately 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. In the right part, more TE insertions and other large InDels can be found, which fits the higher divergence time estimate. In addition, there is one region (region C) that is so divergent in the two species that sequences could not be aligned reliably. Therefore, this region was excluded from the overall sequence alignment and compared separately (Fig. 2C). Region C lies between the two LRK genes and has a size of 1,800 bp in Chinese Spring and 2,800 bp in Ae. tauschii. Some parts of region C are conserved between Chinese Spring and Ae. tauschii, although at a lower level of sequence identity. Additionally, it contains several unique fragments that indicate multiple InDel events (Fig. 2C).
In total, we identified nine unequal crossing-over events that caused differences in the compared sequences. These events must have occurred in the relatively recent evolutionary history, since the divergence of the sequences studied. All detected unequal crossing-over events occurred in non-genic regions. Seven of them affected relatively small arrays of tandem repeats, while two had a major impact on the size of the regions because they occurred between the LTRs of retrotransposons. One of them resulted in a solo-LTR, while the other produced a tandem element: the barley Haruna Nijo sequence at the Vrs1 locus contains a full-length RLC_BARE1 retrotransposon close to its left end, while the Morex sequence contains a solo-LTR at this position. Based on the LTR divergence of the full-length element, we estimated RLC_BARE1 to have inserted at its location approximately 190,000 ± 63,000 years ago. The SD is relatively high, as the two LTRs differ in only nine positions. Because the solo-LTR in the Morex sequence is a hybrid of the two LTRs of the full-length element, comparison of specific SNPs allowed us to narrow down the putative breakpoint of the unequal crossing over to a stretch of 252 bp (Fig. 3A ).
The tandem element resulting from unequal crossing over was found close to the left end of the region compared between Chinese Spring and Ae. tauschii. A large 14-kb LTR retrotransposon of the Gypsy superfamily was found in its original full-length form in Ae. tauschii, while in Chinese Spring it had undergone an unequal crossing-over event. The unequal homologous recombination occurred between the two LTRs, resulting in a tandem element with three LTRs and two internal domains. Additionally, one unit of the tandem element was subsequently partially deleted (Fig. 3B).
Methylation of cytosine in CG and CNG sites increases the likelihood of spontaneous transitions from C to T (reviewed in Walsh and Xu, 2006
Compared with other plant species such as Arabidopsis or rice, sequence information from Triticeae crops is still very limited. In addition, only relatively few BAC libraries from different varieties are available. The germplasm analyzed in this study represents a broad range of Triticeae species and varieties, allowing for comparisons within diploid and hexaploid species as well as for cross comparison. By including sequences from BAC libraries each from three wheat and barley varieties, we exploited all resources available to date for barley and hexaploid wheat. The D genome of wheat is especially interesting as it shows a low level of diversity and provides a background with low levels of gene flow. In addition, loci on the D genome can be easily compared with sequences from the diploid donor species Ae. tauschii. The analysis of intergenic sequences proved to be very efficient for understanding the evolutionary history of the loci studied. Since genes are under selection pressure, they do not diverge at a constant rate and cannot be used directly for divergence time estimates. Additionally, genes evolve more slowly and allow for many fewer genomic rearrangements than intergenic sequences. In contrast, TE and other nongenic sequences keep a trace record of all mutations and rearrangements. Therefore, the high repeat content of Triticeae genomes, although an obstacle for sequencing, makes them ideally suited to study the molecular mechanisms of genome evolution.
The extensive stretches of TE sequences allowed very precise estimates of divergence times. However, these have to be considered with caution for two reasons. First, for sequences that differ in only a few base pairs, all SNPs have to be carefully checked either by resequencing or at least by examining the quality of sequences and assembly in the respective positions. For this study, we resequenced the regions of all SNPs between the wheat varieties Chinese Spring, Glenlea, and Renan to exclude the possibility of sequencing errors. Second, because TE sequences are often heavily methylated in Triticeae, an increased mutation rate in CG and CNG sites has to be expected (Walsh and Xu, 2006
It is amazing that the comparison of only three loci from a few varieties resulted in the identification of multiple haplotypes. Our comparative analysis, therefore, suggests that haplotypes of distant evolutionary origin are common in the Triticeae gene pool. By analyzing SNP frequencies, we found that different parts of the sequences diverged at different time points. The identified haplotype divergences cover a relatively broad time span. Haplotypes 1 and 2 at the barley Vrs1 locus diverged approximately 160,000 and 930,000 years ago, while the two haplotype segments identified in Ae. tauschii diverged approximately 50,000 and 500,000 years ago. The ages of the two older haplotypes are comparable to the previously described ancient haplotypes at the wheat Lr10 locus (Isidore et al., 2005b
The evolutionary interpretation becomes more complex if the data are evaluated in more detail. For example, we estimated that the Vrs1 sequences of Haruna Nijo and Morex diverged approximately 120,000 years ago, which is significantly different from the 160,000 years ago divergence for the "younger" haplotype at the Rym4 locus. Thus, the sequences of the Vrs1 and Rym4 loci must represent yet again haplotypes that diverged at different points in time. The more divergent part of the Ae. tauschii sequence might also represent several distinct segments, as the SNP distribution along the sequence is very uneven when compared with Chinese Spring. Additionally, the Ae. tauschii sequence contains an extremely divergent DNA segment between the two LRK genes. Because of its short length, this is more likely to be the result of a gene conversion event rather than a double crossing over. It seems that this region was introgressed from yet another, more divergent haplotype or from a different locus in the genome (e.g. a homoeologous locus of the A or B genome). An example of the latter was recently published (Zhang and Dubcovsky, 2008
Interestingly, previous studies placed the divergence of the D genome of hexaploid wheat with Ae. tauschii approximately between 550,000 and 900,000 years ago (Chantret et al., 2005
The level of polymorphism observed between the three wheat varieties is much lower than that between the barley varieties. This is in perfect agreement with the fact that the hybridization event adding the D genome to tetraploid wheat occurred only about 8,000 years ago (Feldman, 2001
In contrast, the barley haplotypes are much older. There are two possible explanations that are not mutually exclusive. It has been hypothesized (Zohary, 1996 We conclude that the molecular analysis of intraspecies diversity in wheat and barley at the haplotype level confirms and extends our knowledge of the evolutionary history of these two crop species. Our data demonstrate that divergence time can only be determined for haplotypes or segments of them, but not for varieties. Therefore, we are confronted with an emerging picture of a gene pool that consists of a large number of haplotypes that have frequently recombined in the past. However, these events were not frequent enough to completely homogenize the entire gene pool, instead still allowing for distinct haplotype fragments to be identified.
The intraspecies comparative analyses provided an opportunity to study seven unequal crossing-over events in great detail. For all of them, obvious template sequences such as LTRs of retrotransposons or arrays of tandem repeats could be identified. The two unequal crossing-over events in LTR retrotransposons nicely illustrate the potential of unequal homologous recombination to either expand or contract a region. Solo-LTRs are reported frequently in plants (Shirasu et al., 2000
Five incidents of unequal crossing over affected arrays of tandem repeats. All of these arrays were found either in TEs or in noncoding intergenic sequences. From the available data, we conclude that such tandem arrays frequently expand and contract through unequal crossing over. As it was recently described for Leu-rich repeats of resistance gene analogs (Wicker et al., 2007
As in previous studies (Shirasu et al., 2000 SSRs or microsatellites have long been used as molecular markers and are formed by relatively long stretches of dinucleotide, trinucleotide, or tetranucleotide repeats that are polymorphic because of template slippage. Indeed, we also found that most InDels were apparently caused by template slippage, resulting in a short DNA motif being repeated in different numbers between two genomic sequences. Template slippage was by far the most abundant cause of InDels between sequences that diverged only recently (e.g. Glenlea and Chinese Spring). However, two observations were unexpected. First, we found that most of the motifs that were affected by template slippage were relatively short homopolymers (i.e. stretches of only three or four identical nucleotides). This is surprising because it is commonly found that SSRs are only polymorphic if they have a certain length. Second, InDels greatly outnumbered nucleotide substitutions in the Glenlea versus Chinese Spring comparison. This suggests that template slippage is a more frequent source of polymorphism than nucleotide substitution. This finding has implications for the design of highly polymorphic molecular markers for breeding germplasm, particularly for the wheat D genome, with its low degree of polymorphism: a strategy allowing the efficient isolation of short homopolymers (e.g. by resequencing arrays) might result in a very large number of potential molecular markers, as such short motifs are more frequent than the typically used SSRs and SNPs.
Although the regions studied in this work might not be fully representative for the whole genomes (e.g. because of a putatively strong selection pressure on these regions involved in disease resistance or spike morphology), there are several possible implications for the future genetic analysis of agronomical traits in Triticeae crops. The finding of recombined haplotypes has to be considered in association with mapping, as single, "haplotype-specific" markers might actually detect different, recombined haplotypes. As we have shown here, comparative analysis allows us to detect such recombined haplotypes. A future, large-scale analysis of haplotypes (including both genic and intergenic regions) in Triticeae gene pools will be greatly supported by the next generation of sequencing technologies, such as 454, Solexa, and oligonucleotide resequencing arrays similar to those used in Arabidopsis (Clark et al., 2007 ; Zeller et al., 2008). Such data will provide a basis for genome-wide mapping of intraspecies variability and haplotypes in the Triticeae gene pool, with the ultimate goal of obtaining haplotype maps including both genic and intergenic regions. Such maps could help identify large chromosomal segments containing multiple traits or alleles in specific varieties. An essential requirement for such broad and systematic analyses will be the production of advanced drafts of complete reference genomes for wheat and barley. Two international efforts are currently under way to produce physical maps for the wheat variety Chinese Spring (International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium; www.wheatgenome.org) and the barley variety Morex (International Barley Sequencing Consortium; www.public.iastate.edu/ imagefpc/IBSC Webpage/).
We have found that despite a great diversity and great age of the ancient haplotypes, sequence diversity within genes or differences in gene content were minimal. This contrasts with findings in maize, in which a large number of gene fragments distinguished varieties (Fu and Dooner, 2002
Shotgun Sequencing
BAC clones were obtained by screening of publicly available BAC libraries of the respective varieties (Table III
). Identified BACs were confirmed either by Southern-blot hybridization to fingerprint blots obtained after single restriction of BAC DNA or by PCR amplification of specific genic or genomic markers from the corresponding BACs. BAC shotgun sequencing was done on an ABI3730 automated sequencer (Applied Biosystems). Base calling and quality trimming of the sequences were done using PHRED version 0.020425.c (Ewing et al., 1998
Sequence Analysis
For sequence analysis, programs from the EMBOSS package (http://emboss.sourceforge.net/), ClustalW (Thompson et al., 1994 For sequences that differed in only very few base pairs, primers were designed and all regions containing SNPs were resequenced independently. The sequences described in this study were deposited at GenBank under accession numbers FJ436983, FJ436984 to FJ436986, and FJ477091 to FJ477093.
We thank Jelena Perovic for her excellent technical assistance. Received September 10, 2008; accepted November 12, 2008; published November 14, 2008.
1 This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 3100–105620 to B.K.), by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries of Japan (Genomics for Agricultural Innovation grant no. TRC1004 and Green Technology project no. GD3006), by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (grant nos. CSP00063 and 00099), the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (grant no. 0312280A; GABI-MAP), and Promotion of Basic Research Activities for Innovative Biosciences (to K.S.). 
2 These authors contributed equally to the article.
3 Present address: Julius-Kuehn-Institute, Institute for Resistance Research and Stress Tolerance, Erwin-Baur-Strasse 27, D–06484 Quedlinburg, Germany. The author responsible for distribution of materials integral to the findings presented in this article in accordance with the policy described in the Instructions for Authors (www.plantphysiol.org) is: Beat Keller (bkeller{at}botinst.uzh.ch).
[OA] Open Access articles can be viewed online without a subscription. www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/doi/10.1104/pp.108.129734 * Corresponding author; e-mail bkeller{at}botinst.uzh.ch.
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, β, 
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indicate large InDels. The question mark indicates a gap of unknown size in the Ae. tauschii sequence. B, Density of nucleotide substitutions between Chinese Spring and Ae. tauschii in a 1,000-bp sliding window with 100-bp sliding steps. The regions A through E are discussed in the text. C, Detailed map of a region highly variable between Chinese Spring and Ae. tauschii. Stretches that could be aligned are connected with turquoise and pink areas.
