Background: pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) is a significant cause of yield loss in cereal crops, and is an important topic of study for the improvement of wheat quality. Many studies have focused on PHS in wheat during the last 10 years, especially on the involvement of abscisic acid (ABA) in PHS, however, a lot remained unknown about this topic.Results: In this study, a PHS resistant line was isolated from an ethylmethane sulfonate (EMS) mutant population derived from the wheat cultivar ‘Long 13-3778’, namely ‘LQ18’. The mutant line LQ18 showed highly significant resistance to PHS compared with the wild-type. Transcriptome sequencing was conducted to determine the differences between the LQ18 mutant and the wild-type at the level of gene expression. The results showed no conclusive evidence that the ABA biosynthesis and signaling pathways contribute to the differences in PHS between the mutant and the wild-type, and some genes and their alleles associated with PHS tolerance showed differential expression between the mutant and wild-type lines. The most interesting result of this study was that the expression levels of the chitinase family genes showed significant differences between the mutant and the wild-type as determined by GO enrichment analysis, and a subsequent analysis of differential expression profiling of the chitinase genes led to the same conclusion.Conclusions: Transcriptomic analysis in this study have revealed the global transcriptome profiles of the PHS sensitive wheat cultivar ‘Long 13-3778’ and its PHS resistant mutants. Furthermore, this study has proposed a possible explanation of the connection between PHS and the chitinase family for the first time, which added to our understanding of PHS and seed dormancy in common wheat.