Abstract
Environmental factors like temperature and humidity are presumed to greatly influence Fusarium head blight FHB infections in wheat. Anther retention AR, on the other hand, is a morphologically neutral trait that shares a common genetic basis with FHB resistance. In this study, our aims were to: (i) Evaluate two types of corrections of FHB severity scores, namely method-1 via linear regression on flowering time (FT), and method-2 via a best-subset multiple linear regression analysis comprising FT plus accumulated thermal time variables; and (ii) assess the performance of multi-trait genomic selection (MT.GS) models for FHB severity assisted by AR. The forward prediction scenarios where GS models were trained with data from the previous years revealed average prediction accuracies (PA) of 0.28, 0.33, and 0.36 for FHB severity scores that were uncorrected or corrected by method-1 and method-2, respectively. FHB severity scores free from the influences of both environment and phenology seemed to be the most efficient trait to be predicted across different seasons. Average PA increments up to 1.9-fold were furthermore obtained for the MT.GS models, evidencing the feasibility of using AR as an assisting trait to improve the genomic selection of FHB resistance breeding lines.
Highlights
Fusarium head blight Fusarium head blight severity (FHBs) has become a major threat for wheat production, in warm and humid regions [1]
The 2018 trial was the most variable in terms of flowering time contrarily to the 2017 trial that had the smallest range in FT
This study evaluated a procedure consisting of a best-subset multiple linear regression analysis accounting for earliness and temperature variables to produce corrected FHB severity scores that were subsequently compared with the original trait under various genomic prediction scenarios
Summary
Fusarium head blight FHB has become a major threat for wheat production, in warm and humid regions [1]. FHB is caused by several members of the Fusarium genus yet evidence supports that resistance to FHB is neither Fusarium-species- nor isolate-specific [2,3,4]. The economic impact of this fungal disease is caused by either subtle to severe grain yield and quality losses, or mycotoxin accumulation [5]. The combination of tolerant varieties, fungicides, and specific management practices might be used to decrease FHB losses [6,7] such as the $1.18 billion reached in United States in 2015–2016 [8]. Genetic improvement of host resistance is considered the most sustainable and suitable approach to manage this disease [9]. More than 500 quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for FHB resistance have been mapped into 44 chromosomal regions
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