Abstract
High quality is the main goal of today’s maize breeding and the investigation of grain quality traits would help to breed high-quality varieties in maize. In this study, genome-wide association studies in a set of 248 diverse inbred lines were performed with 83,057 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and five grain quality traits were investigated in diverse environments for two years. The results showed that maize inbred lines showed substantial natural variations of grain quality and these traits showed high broad-sense heritability. A total of 49 SNPs were found to be significantly associated with grain quality traits. Among these SNPs, four co-localized sites were commonly detected by multiple traits. The candidate genes which were searched for can be classified into 11 biological processes, 13 cellular components, and 6 molecular functions. Finally, we found 29 grain quality-related genes. These genes and the SNPs identified in the study would offer essential information for high-quality varieties breeding programs in maize.
Highlights
High quality is the main goal of today’s maize breeding and the investigation of grain quality traits would help to breed high-quality varieties in maize
Liu et al.[4] detected seven QTLs associated with protein content, six QTLs associated with starch content, and five QTLs associated with oil content using F2:3 population and B C2F2 population
Significant correlations were detected among grain quality traits, except for the correlation between moisture content and protein content (p = − 0.13) and the correlation between oil content and lysine content (p = 0.079) (Fig. 1)
Summary
High quality is the main goal of today’s maize breeding and the investigation of grain quality traits would help to breed high-quality varieties in maize. Genome-wide association studies in a set of 248 diverse inbred lines were performed with 83,057 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and five grain quality traits were investigated in diverse environments for two years. These genes and the SNPs identified in the study would offer essential information for high-quality varieties breeding programs in maize. Over the past two decades, genetic dissection of nutritional quality in maize kernels by classical QTL mapping has resulted in the identification of numerous nutritional quality QTLs. Mangolin et al.[3] detected 13 QTLs by QTL mapping of maize kernel oil content in F2:3 population. We used NIRS to measure the main nutritional quality traits of 248 maize inbred lines and used 83,057 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) markers to conduct GWAS. Our study was designed to accomplish the following objectives: (1) perform GWAS to identify SNPs responsible for moisture, Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:9797
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