Identification of QTL underlying physiological and morphological traits of flag leaf in barley.

Lipan Liu,Chengdao Li,Dongfa Sun,Xifeng Ren,Genlou Sun

doi:10.1186/s12863-015-0187-y

Abstract

BackgroundPhysiological and morphological traits of flag leaf play important roles in determining crop grain yield and biomass. In order to understand genetic basis controlling physiological and morphological traits of flag leaf, a double haploid (DH) population derived from the cross of Huaai 11 × Huadamai 6 was used to detect quantitative trait locus (QTL) underlying 7 physiological and 3 morphological traits at the pre-filling stage in year 2012 and 2013.ResultsTotal of 38 QTLs distributed on chromosome 1H, 2H, 3H, 4H, 6H and 7H were detected, and explained 6.53% - 31.29% phenotypic variation. The QTLs flanked by marker Bmag829 and GBM1218 on chromosome 2H were associated with net photosynthetic rate (Pn), stomatal conductance (Gs), flag leaf area (LA), flag leaf length (FLL), flag leaf width (FLW), relative chlorophyll content (SPD) and leaf nitrogen concentration (LNC).ConclusionTwo QTL cluster regions associated with physiological and morphological traits, one each on the chromosome 2H and 7H, were observed. The two markers (Bmag829 and GBM1218) may be useful for marker assisted selection (MAS) in barley breeding.

Highlights

Physiological and morphological traits of flag leaf play important roles in determining crop grain yield and biomass
The values of leaf area (LA), flag leaf length (FLL) and flag leaf width (FLW) were higher in Huadamai 6 than those in Huaai 11
All traits displayed a normal distribution with the skewness and kurtosis among −1 and 1 (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Physiological and morphological traits of flag leaf play important roles in determining crop grain yield and biomass. Grain yield was controlled by complex biochemical and physiological processes, and closely related to physiological and morphological traits [3,4,5,6,7]. Importance of flag leaf on increasing grain yield has widely been studied [6,7,9]. Previous studies have mainly focused on either morphological traits [10,11,12] or physiological traits of flag leaf [13,14,15,16,17,18] determining grain yield. Few QTLs associated with these traits have been applied to barley breeding due to complicated measurement procedure, inconsistency and dynamic process of physiological and morphological traits

Methods

Results

Conclusion