Fine mapping of yellow-green leaf gene (<italic>ygl2</italic>) in soybean (<italic>Glycine max </italic>L.)

Abstract

<p id="C3">Leaf is the main organ of photosynthetic carbon assimilation in soybean, and its color is not only related to the trapping power and conversion efficiency of light energy, but also closely related to the yield of soybean. Therefore, the mining of soybean leaf color-related genes is of great significance to analyze the yield of soybean from the pathway of photosynthetic carbon assimilation. Yellow-green leaf is a mutation type different from common green leaves of soybean, and it is an important genetic material to explore the genes related to leaf color of soybean. In this study, we found a yellow-green leaf mutant <italic>ygl2</italic> (yellow-green leaf 2), which was naturally mutated from soybean strain GL11, and its yellow-green leaf phenotype could be stably inherited. Compared with the green leaf wild type GL11, the leaf chlorophyll content of mutant <italic>ygl2</italic> decreased significantly, and there were significant differences in plant height, 100-grain weight, and protein content. The segregated population was constructed by GL11 and <italic>ygl2</italic>. Genetic analysis showed that the yellow-green leaf phenotype of <italic>ygl2</italic> was controlled by a pair of recessive nuclear genes. The yellow-green leaf gene <italic>ygl2</italic> was located between SSR markers 02_104 and 02_107 at the end of chromosome 2 using the isolated population, with an interval physical distance of 56.1 kb, and contained nine genes. These results laid a solid foundation for map-based cloning and molecular marker-assisted breeding of yellow and green leaf genes in soybean.