CONSTRUCTING A PANEL OF INTROGRESSION LINES OF T. URARTU ID388 IN T. MONOCOCCUM L118 AS TOOL TO IDENTIFY QTLS FOR MICRONUTRIENT CONTENT

T. urartu and T. monococcum are two diploid wheat species carrying different forms of the A genome. In this study we principally faced the problem of sexual compatibility barriers between these two species, studying the segregation in offspring obtained from fifteen crosses derived from diploid wheats. To reach these aims, several crosses between T. monococcum and T. urartu and between T. boeoticum and T. urartu were carried out to investigate the actual behaviour of F1 hybrids in terms of fertility percentage. The results obtained from these analyses clearly showed that a small fraction of these F1 hybrids is fertile when self-fertilized and evidenced that both epigenetic factors and pairwise genetic distances between T. monococcum or T. boeoticum and T. urartu parents could play a key role in determining the fate of these crosses. To depict the chromosome organization, in term of Au and Am genome contribution, of plants that gave rise to fertile offspring, two fertile F2 plant hybrids were further self-fertilised to generate two corresponding F3 segregating populations (B53 and B54) and a method that takes into account the tightly co-segregating AFLP loci in such F3 populations was implemented to investigate the contribution of Au and Am loci in B53 and B54 F2 plants. This approach allowed the analysis of segregation distortion and its impact in developing chimeric chromosome for Au and Am genomes, as well as providing a basis for creating interspecific introgression lines of T. urartu in T. monococcum.