Inheritance of Cold Hardiness and Dehydrin Genes in Diploid Mapping Populations of Blueberry

Abstract

Summary Studies of herbaceous plants suggest that cold hardiness is a complex, quantitatively inherited trait. Although development of cold hardiness is an integral part of the life cycle of woody perennial plants, studies on the genetic control of cold hardiness in woody perennials are scarce. A better understanding of the genetic control of cold hardiness would be valuable for developing more effective strategies to increase cold hardiness and, hence, climatic adaptation of woody perennial crops. In blueberry, three major dehydrins of 65, 60, and 14 kDa have been found to increase with cold acclimation and decrease with deac-climation. A comparison of these dehydrin levels among various blueberry cultivars and selections has revealed their level of accumulation to be closely associated with cold hardiness level. Efforts are underway to isolate and map the dehydrin genes of blueberry utilizing blueberry populations that segregate for cold hardiness in order to determine if the dehydrin genes map to or co-segregate with QTLs controlling cold hardiness. Progress has been made toward this goal. Cold hardiness levels were determined for a portion of the blueberry mapping populations (derived from testcrosses of Vaccinium darrowi Camp X V. caesariense Mackenz. F1s to another V. darrowi and another V. caesariense) using a laboratory controlled freeze-thaw regime, followed by visual assessment of injury to floral buds. As expected, the V. darrowi and V. caesariense parents were found to differ significantly in terms of cold hardiness levels (LT50s of -13°C and -20°C, respectively). Mean cold hardiness level of F1s (LT50 of -14.7°C) was skewed toward the V. darrowi parents suggesting that cold hardiness is a partially recessive trait. The sequence of a 2.0 kb cDNA clone, which encodes the 60 kDa blueberry dehydrin, was used to map a dehydrin-related gene to current linkage group 12 of the V. caesariense testcross population. A preliminary comparison of the segregation pattern of the dehydrin-related gene to that of the cold hardiness trait suggests that the marker does not segregate with cold hardiness.