2.1 Plant materials
The Aegilops tauschii materials were collected from natural populations in central Asia (mostly in Iran) and in China (Xinjiang), the weedy populations were from the Yellow River region. A wheat cultivar, Chinese Spring (CS), from Sichuan Province in China was used as a control. All accessions (Table 1) were provided by the Crop Research Institute (CRI) of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (SAAS).