Analysis of DNA methylation variation in wheat genetic background after alien chromatin introduction based on methylation-sensitive amplification polymorphism

During the process of alien germplasm introduced into wheat genome by chromosome engineering, extensive genetic variations of genome structure and gene expression in recipient could be induced. In this study, we performed GISH (genome in situ hybridization) and AFLP (amplified fragment length polymorphism) on wheat-rye chromosome translocation lines and their parents to detect the identity in genomic structure of different translocation lines. The results showed that the genome primary structure variations were not obviously detected in different translocation lines except the same 1RS chromosome translocation. Methylation sensitive amplification polymorphism (MSAP) analyses on genomic DNA showed that the ratios of fully-methylated sites were significantly increased in translocation lines (CN12, 20.15%; CN17, 20.91%; CN18, 22.42%), but the ratios of hemimethylated sites were significantly lowered (CN12, 21.41%; CN17, 23.43%; CN18, 22.42%), whereas 16.37% were fully-methylated and 25.44% were hemimethylated in case of their wheat parent. Twenty-nine classes of methylation patterns were identified in a comparative assay of cytosine methylation patterns between wheat-rye translocation lines and their wheat parent, including 13 hypermethylation patterns (33.74%), 9 demethylation patterns (22.76%) and 7 uncertain patterns (4.07%). In further sequence analysis, the alterations of methylation pattern affected both repetitive DNA sequences, such as retrotransposons and tandem repetitive sequences, and low-copy DNA.