Abstract
Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a destructive wheat disease present throughout the world, and host resistance is an effective and economical strategy used to control FHB. Lack of adequate resistance resource is still a main bottleneck for FHB genetics and wheat breeding research. The synthetic-derived bread wheat line C615, which does not carry the Fhb1 gene, is a promising source of FHB resistance for breeding. A population of 198 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) produced by crossing C615 with the susceptible cultivar Yangmai 13 was evaluated for FHB response using point and spray inoculations. As the disease phenotype is frequently complicated by other agronomic traits, we used both traditional and multivariate conditional QTL mapping approaches to investigate the genetic relationships (at the individual QTL level) between FHB resistance and plant height (PH), spike compactness (SC), and days to flowering (FD). A linkage map was constructed from 3,901 polymorphic SNP markers, which covered 2,549.2 cM. Traditional and conditional QTL mapping analyses found 13 and 22 QTL for FHB, respectively; 10 were identified by both methods. Among these 10, three QTL from C615 were detected in multiple years; these QTL were located on chromosomes 2AL, 2DS, and 2DL. Conditional QTL mapping analysis indicated that, at the QTL level, SC strongly influenced FHB in point inoculation; whereas PH and SC contributed more to FHB than did FD in spray inoculation. The three stable QTL (QFhbs-jaas.2AL, QFhbp-jaas.2DS, and QFhbp-jaas.2DL) for FHB were partly affected by or were independent of the three agronomic traits. The QTL detected in this study improve our understanding of the genetic relationships between FHB response and related traits at the QTL level and provide useful information for marker-assisted selection for the improvement of FHB resistance in breeding.
Highlights
Fusarium head blight (FHB), known as head scab, is one of the most destructive fungal diseases of wheat and is found in temperate and subtropical regions around the world
High-density linkage maps are required for genetic studies on common wheat and its large, complex genome (Peleg et al, 2008; Zhai et al, 2016)
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are widely distributed throughout the genome have been used in QTL mapping (McCartney et al, 2016; Cui et al, 2017)
Summary
Fusarium head blight (FHB), known as head scab, is one of the most destructive fungal diseases of wheat and is found in temperate and subtropical regions around the world. The most important fungal pathogens associated with FHB are Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium culmorum (Parry et al, 1995). FHB reduces grain yield and quality due to shriveled kernels with low weight and contamination of several mycotoxins, such as deoxynivalenol (DON). FHB causes about 10–70% yield loss in epidemic years (Zhang et al, 2011). In the Middle-Lower Yangtze River Valley Region of China, FHB causes 5–10% yield loss in most years but can cause losses of nearly 100% in severe epidemic years (Cheng et al, 2012). Host resistance is currently recognized as the most effective and environmentally friendly method of FHB management (He et al, 2013), justifying the use of resistant varieties to control FHB
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