Abstract
Barley is cultivated more widely than the other major world crops because it adapts well to environmental constraints, such as drought, heat, and day length. To better understand the genetic control of local adaptation in barley, we studied development in the nested association mapping population HEB-25, derived from crossing 25 wild barley accessions with the cultivar 'Barke'. HEB-25 was cultivated in replicated field trials in Dundee (Scotland) and Halle (Germany), differing in regard to day length, precipitation, and temperature. Applying a genome-wide association study, we located 60 and 66 quantitative trait locus (QTL) regions regulating eight plant development traits in Dundee and Halle, respectively. A number of QTLs could be explained by known major genes such as PHOTOPERIOD 1 (Ppd-H1) and FLOWERING LOCUS T (HvFT-1) that regulate plant development. In addition, we observed that developmental traits in HEB-25 were partly controlled via genotype × environment and genotype × donor interactions, defined as location-specific and family-specific QTL effects. Our findings indicate that QTL alleles are available in the wild barley gene pool that show contrasting effects on plant development, which may be deployed to improve adaptation of cultivated barley to future environmental changes.
Highlights
Barley (Hordeum vulgare), a model species for temperate cereals, is an important crop in marginal environments (Baum et al, 2007; Rollins et al, 2013), which are characterised by abiotic stresses such as heat, drought, and nutrient deficiency
Significant genotype × treatment (G×T) interactions were only observed for HEA and MAT in both locations and for RIP in Halle (Supplementary Table S1)
In our study we showed that cumulative significant SNP effects (Maurer et al, 2017) can be applied to identify family-specific quantitative trait locus (QTL) effects of exotic alleles and to make use of the full potential of the multi-parental barley nested association mapping (NAM) population HEB-25
Summary
Barley (Hordeum vulgare), a model species for temperate cereals, is an important crop in marginal environments (Baum et al, 2007; Rollins et al, 2013), which are characterised by abiotic stresses such as heat, drought, and nutrient deficiency. These poor and stress-prone environments offer the biggest opportunities for substantially increased yields on a global scale (Tester and Langridge, 2010). In temperate climates most climate-change scenarios predict increasing average temperatures and elevated risks for extreme weather conditions such as drought and heat (Settele et al, 2014) These ecosystem changes may affect current high-yielding environments. Despite the relatively high stress tolerance of barley there is still room for it to be increased further, for instance through fine-tuning of plant development
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