Abstract
Plant height (PH) plays a pivotal role in plant morphological architecture and is associated with yield potential in wheat. For the quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis, a recombinant inbred line population was developed between varieties differing significantly in PH. Two major QTL were identified on chromosomes 4B (QPh.sicau-4B) and 6D (QPh.sicau-6D) in multiple environments, which were then validated in two different backgrounds by using closely linked markers. QPh.sicau-4B explained 10.1–21.3% of the phenotypic variance, and the location corresponded to the dwarfing gene Rht-B1. QPh.sicau-6D might be a novel QTL for PH, explaining 6.6–13.6% of the phenotypic variance and affecting spike length, thousand-kernel weight, and spikelet compactness. Three candidate genes associated with plant growth and development were identified in the physical interval of QPh.sicau-6D. Collectively, we identified a novel stable and major PH QTL, QPh.sicau-6D, which could aid in the development of closely linked markers for marker-assisted breeding and cloning genes underlying this QTL.
Highlights
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is an important staple crop, ranking the third after maize and rice in terms of yield in China (Edae et al, 2014; Liu et al, 2018)
The frequency of Plant height (PH) in the HCN population showed continuous distribution, ranging from 51.50 to 124.2 cm (Table 1 and Supplementary Figure S1); this implied that PH was affected by multiple loci
Phenotypic correlation coefficients between PH and other spike-related traits were obtained based on the best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) values (Table 3)
Summary
Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is an important staple crop, ranking the third after maize and rice in terms of yield in China (Edae et al, 2014; Liu et al, 2018). In the past two decades, numerous major and minor QTL influencing PH have been identified on 21 chromosomes in wheat, and some of them have been applied in wheat breeding (Peng et al, 1999; Liu et al, 2002; Griffiths et al, 2012; Würschum et al, 2015; Tian et al, 2017; Hassan et al, 2019). Several PH genes have been cloned, such as Rht-B1 and Rht-D1 (located on chromosome 4B and 4D, respectively), and highly adopted in breeding practices during the green revolution; they encode the DELLA proteins, participating in gibberellin signaling, and thereby affecting PH (Peng et al, 1999; Pearce et al, 2011). In Arabidopsis, extensively studied dwarf mutants such as the yda and pat mutants, which are defective in growth and development, have been shown to significantly differ from the wild-type plants in terms of PH (Lukowitz et al, 2004; Zhou et al, 2013)
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