The marriage of metabolomic approaches with genetic design has proven a powerful tool in dissecting diversity in the metabolome and has additionally enhanced our understanding of complex traits. That said, such studies have rarely been carried out in wheat. In this study, we detected 805 metabolites from wheat kernels and profiled their relative contents among 182 wheat accessions, conducting a metabolite‐based genome‐wide association study (mGWAS) utilizing 14 646 previously described polymorphic SNP markers. A total of 1098 mGWAS associations were detected with large effects, within which 26 candidate genes were tentatively designated for 42 loci. Enzymatic assay of two candidates indicated they could catalyse glucosylation and subsequent malonylation of various flavonoids and thereby the major flavonoid decoration pathway of wheat kernel was dissected. Moreover, numerous high‐confidence genes associated with metabolite contents have been provided, as well as more subdivided metabolite networks which are yet to be explored within our data. These combined efforts presented the first step towards realizing metabolomics‐associated breeding of wheat.

中文翻译：

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基于代谢物的全基因组关联研究使得能够解剖小麦籽粒的类黄酮修饰途径。

代谢组学方法与遗传设计的结合已被证明是剖析代谢组学多样性的有力工具，并进一步加深了我们对复杂性状的理解。也就是说，这种研究很少在小麦中进行。在这项研究中，我们检测了805个小麦粒中的805种代谢物，并分析了其在182种小麦中的相对含量，利用14646种先前描述的多态性SNP标记物进行了基于代谢物的全基因组关联研究（mGWAS）。共检测到1098个mGWAS关联，效果显着，其中26个候选基因被暂时指定为42个基因座。两种候选物的酶法测定表明它们可以催化各种类黄酮的糖基化和随后的丙二酰化，从而剖析了小麦籽粒的主要类黄酮修饰途径。而且，已经提供了许多与代谢物含量相关的高可信度基因，以及更多细分的代谢物网络，这些尚未在我们的数据中进行探索。这些共同的努力为实现与代谢组学相关的小麦育种迈出了第一步。