Dissection of genetic effects of quantitative trait loci (QTL) in transgenic cotton

Abstract

When alien DNA inserts into the cotton genome in a multicopy manner, several quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in the cotton genome are disrupted; these are called dQTL in this study. A transgenic mutant line is near-isogenic to its recipient, which is divergent for the dQTL from the remaining QTLs. Therefore, a set of data from a transgenic QTL line mutated by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation (30074), its recipient and their F1 hybrids, and three elite lines were analyzed under a modified additive-dominance model with genotype × environment interactions in three different environments to separate the genetic effects due to dQTL from whole-genome effects. Our result showed that dQTL had significant additive effects on lint percentage, boll weight, and boll number per square meter, while it had little genetic association with fiber traits, seed cotton yield, and lint yield. The dQTL in 30074 significantly increased lint percentage and boll number, while significantly decreasing boll weight, having little effect on fibre traits, while those from the recipient and three elite lines showed significant genetic effects on lint percentage. In addition, the remaining QTL other than dQTL had significant additive effects on seed cotton yield, fruiting branch number, uniformity index, micronaire, and short fibre index, and significant dominance effects on seed cotton yield, lint yield, and boll number per square meter. The additive and dominance effects under homozygous and heterozygous conditions for each line are also predicted in this study.