Abstract
Powdery mildew caused by Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei is a foliar disease with highly negative impact on yield and grain quality in barley. Thus, breeding for powdery mildew resistance is an important goal and requires constantly the discovery of new sources of natural resistance. Here, we report the high resolution genetic and physical mapping of a dominant race-specific powdery mildew resistance locus, originating from an Ethiopian spring barley accession ‘HOR2573,’ conferring resistance to several modern mildew isolates. High-resolution genetic mapping narrowed down the interval containing the resistance locus to a physical span of 850 kb. Four candidate genes with homology to known disease resistance gene families were identified. The mapped resistance locus coincides with a previously reported resistance locus from Hordeum laevigatum, suggesting allelism at the same locus in two different barley lines. Therefore, we named the newly mapped resistance locus from HOR2573 as MlLa-H. The reported co-segregating and flanking markers may provide new tools for marker-assisted selection of this resistance locus in barley breeding.
Highlights
Cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare L.), is ranked fourth after rice (Oryza sativa L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and maize (Zea mays L.) in terms of crop production
The broad sense – Heritability for powdery mildew resistance was higher than 98% in all three independent phenotyping experiments, indicating that most of the phenotypic variation was genetically determined
The genetic map length ranged between 119.7 cM (4H) and 171.8 cM (7H) per chromosome, respectively, with a total map length of 1,000 cM, which is in the similar range as reported for other genetic maps of barley (Stein et al, 2007; Close et al, 2009; Mascher et al, 2013)
Summary
Cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare L.), is ranked fourth after rice (Oryza sativa L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and maize (Zea mays L.) in terms of crop production. The prevalent use of barley is as a source of feed and forage for livestock, and as source for food and beverages for humans (Ullrich, 2010; Newton et al, 2011). Losses due to pests and diseases in cereals continue to pose a substantial threat to agricultural food and feed production and impact economic decisions as well as practical developments. A cost effective and environmentally sustainable strategy to mitigate the damage and losses caused by plant pathogens is to deploy plant varieties possessing genetic resistance (Johnston et al, 2013). Unlocking genetic diversity in genebank collections is of prime importance to discover and deploy genetic resistance genes or alleles that have been lost during domestication and intensive selection in breeding
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