Nonstructural chromosome differentiation among wheat cultivars, with special reference to differentiation of chromosomes in related species

Wheat cultivar Chinese Spring (Triticum aestivum L. em. Thell.) was crossed with cultivars Hope, Cheyenne and Timstein. In all three hybrids, the frequencies of pollen mother cells (PMCs) with univalents at metaphase I (MI) were higher than those in the parental cultivars. No multivalents were observed in the hybrids, indicating that the cultivars do not differ by translocations. Thirty-one Chinese Spring telosomic lines were then crossed with substitution lines in which single chromosomes of the three cultivars were substituted for their Chinese Spring homologues. The telosomic lines were also crossed with Chinese Spring. Data were collected on the frequencies (% of PMCs) of pairing of the telesomes with their homologues at MI and the regularity of pairing of the remaining 20 pairs of Chinese Spring chromosomes in the monotelodisomics obtained from these crosses. The reduced MI pairing in the intercultivar hybrids was caused primarily by chromosome differentiation, rather than by specific genes. Because the differentiation involved a large part of the chromosome complement in each hybrid, it was concluded that it could not be caused by structural changes such as inversions or translocations. In each case, the differentiation appeared to be unevenly distributed among the three wheat genomes. It is proposed that the same kind of differentiation, although of greater magnitude, differentiates homoeologous chromosomes and is responsible, together with structural differentiation, for poor chromosome pairing in interspecific hybrids.