''Triticum polonicum'', also known as the Polish wheat, is a spring wheat variety of

wheat Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...

. It is an allotetraploid (AABB) species with 28 chromosomes. It can be found in small areas of the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...

region,

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

and in other regions of

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

. It was first described by

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

in 1762. ''T. polonicum'' is characterised by longer

glume In botany, a glume is a bract (leaf-like structure) below a spikelet in the inflorescence (flower cluster) of grasses (Poaceae) or the flowers of sedges (Cyperaceae). There are two other types of bracts in the spikelets of grasses: the lemma and ...

s and grains.

Genetics

Breeding studies revealed in 1905 - and more even definitively in 1920 - that this species' glume length is controlled by a single locus. Since then it has been named ''P1'', determined to be semi-dominant, localised to the short arm of chromosome 7A, and has been shown to be pleitropic for glume and grain and

flower spike An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed on ...

length, and for fewer spikelets per spike. Longer glumes and grains have been localised to the same chromosome of '' T. petropavlovskyi'' and the Portuguese landrace group " Arrancada", suggesting their ancestry includes a contribution from ''T. polonicum''.

References

Plants described in 1762 Wheat Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus {{Pooideae-stub