Aspectos morfológicos e moleculares associados ao caráter tolerância ao encharcamento em trigo

Abstract

Among the cereals, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most important crop reaching the third largest grain production in the world. Wheat is cultivated under many different environmental conditions, presenting high grain yield capacity, nutritional quality and high degree of adaptability. In the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, approximately 5.4 million hectares are considered hydromorphic soils and are mostly used for rice farming and cattle grazing, due to its low drainage capability. Annually, only one million hectares are cultivated with rice, leaving large amounts of land without cropping or cultivated with forage crops. Therefore, there is a strong challenge for breeding programs to develop genotypes capable of tolerating this environment, with a satisfactory cost/benefit ratio for farmers. In order to suppress the energy deficit provoked by hypoxic conditions, several species redirect their metabolic pathways in order to garantee the extra ATP production resulting from an increase in fermentation rates. In those species, a group of proteins that cathalyse glycolisis and phosphate sugar metabolism such as the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), is selectively synthesized. The objective of this work was to verify the possibility of selecting wheat genotypes tolerant to flooding stress, in the greenhouse, by using different periods of flooding conditions alterned with draining periods. Also, to estimate the degree of conservation of the ADH1 gene in some plant species. The results indicate that it is possible to detect genetic variability for the character flooding tolerance in greenhouse. The condition of eight days of flooding revealed that the genotypes BRS 120 and BRS 208 were the most tolerant and the genotypes CD 111 and BRS 194 were the most sensitive. The molecular phylogenetic analysis obtained for the alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH1), indicates that Poaceae members present a high degree of conservation. The closest species were Saccharum oficinarum and Zea mays, presenting higher nucleotide identity. The model species (Oryza sativa) presented a higher dissimilarity regarding the remaining species of the Poaceae, suggesting that this enzyme has acquired novel functions and or mutations that were selected under the flooding condition.