Abstract
Although oat cultivation around the Mediterranean basin is steadily increasing, its yield in these regions lags far behind those of Northern Europe. This results mainly from the poor adaptation of current oat cultivars to Mediterranean environments. Local landraces may act as reservoirs of favorable traits that could contribute to increase oat resilience in this region. To aid selection of suitable agro-climate adapted genotypes we integrated genome-wide association approaches with analysis of field assessed phenotypes of genetic variants and of the weight of associated markers across different environmental variables. Association models accounting for oat population structure were applied on either arithmetic means or best linear unbiased prediction (BLUPs) to ensure robust identification of associations with the agronomic traits evaluated. The meta-analysis of the six joint environments (mega-environment) identified several markers associated with several agronomic traits and crown rust severity. Five of these associated markers were located within expressed genes. These associations were only mildly influenced by climatic variables indicating that these markers are good candidates to improve the genetic potential of oat under Mediterranean conditions. The models also highlighted several marker-trait associations, strongly affected by particular climatic variables including high rain pre- or post-heading dates and high temperatures, revealing strong potential for oat adaptation to specific agro-climatic conditions. These results will contribute to increase oat resilience for particular climatic conditions and facilitate breeding for plant adaptation to a wider range of climatic conditions in the current scenario of climate change.
Highlights
Oat (Avena sativa L.) is a major cereal and fodder crop grown worldwide over approximately 9 million hectares
We aimed to identify genetic markers significantly associated with important agronomic traits, and crown rust resistance, in oat cultivated under Mediterranean conditions
A detailed GxE interaction study that included the phenotyping of the oat collection (Sánchez-Martín et al, 2014, 2017) confirmed that, for all assessed traits, the different environments were included within the same ME
Summary
Oat (Avena sativa L.) is a major cereal and fodder crop grown worldwide over approximately 9 million hectares. A major division of the crop is into white oats Sativa L.), used for human consumption and fodder, and preferred for milling, and red oats In the last two decades the oat Genetic Plasticity of Oats cultivated area steadily increased within the Mediterranean rim, at a rate of 7500 ha/year (FAO, 2015). The cultivated area in Northern and Southern Europe is currently very similar with approximately 1 million hectares each. The yield of northern regions is 2.7-fold higher than that of Mediterranean areas. This highlights the need to improve oat yield by increasing oat resilience to Mediterranean conditions
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