Abstract
Modern plant breeding practices have narrowed the genetic base of wheat throughout the world, increasing crop vulnerability. Therefore, there is clearly a need for introducing new germplasm in breeding programs to search for variability related to traits of agronomic interest for wheat improvement. The existence of subsets of accessions (core collections) that represent the diversity conserved in germplasm collections is a favored approach for breeders to explore novel variation and enhance the use of germplasm. In this study, a core collection of Spanish landraces of bread wheat has been created using high-throughput genotyping technologies (DArTseq), which yielded more than 50 K molecular markers. This marker system not only provides a robust estimate of the diversity, but also information about its distribution in the genome. Two core collections of 94 entries were created by using two common sampling strategies: the maximization strategy and the population structure-based method. Both core collections showed high geographic, phenotypic and genetic representativeness, but the collection obtained with the maximization strategy captured better the diversity displayed by the initial collection. This core collection, which includes a broad range of adapted genotypes, can be efficiently utilized for mining new alleles for useful traits in wheat breeding.
Highlights
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a major staple food crop that is widely grown throughout the world
High-throughput genotyping provides genetic information that can guarantee the full inclusion of the available genetic diversity when creating a core collection
We evaluated the quality of the three core collections (CCs) at different levels: (1) representativeness of the CC for geographic, phenotypic and allelic (Glu-1 and Vrn-A1 loci) variability present in the PS; (2) allelic richness estimated from SNPs; (3) degree of dissimilarity and redundancy according to distances between accessions; and (4) distribution of the genetic variability included in each CC with respect to the PS and along the full genome
Summary
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a major staple food crop that is widely grown throughout the world. In order to meet the increasing requirements of a growing population and tackle the challenges of global climate change, the genetic improvement of this crop must achieve several goals, including higher yield, adaptation to specific environments, tolerance to biotic stresses and quality enhancement. There is clearly a need for introducing new germplasm in breeding programs so as to broaden the gene pool in which to search for new traits of agronomic interest necessary for wheat improvement. These locally adapted varieties, traditionally grown with less artificial resource inputs, are genetically diverse repositories of unique traits that have evolved in local environments, which cover a wide range of biotic and abiotic conditions [2,3].
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