Abstract
Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) is an important vegetable crop having numerous medicinal properties. Earliness and yield related traits are main aims of bitter gourd breeding program. High resolution quantitative trait loci (QTLs) mapping can help in understanding the molecular basis of phenotypic variation of these traits and thus facilitate marker-assisted breeding. The aim of present study was to identify genetic loci controlling earliness, fruit, and seed related traits. To achieve this, genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach was used to genotype 101 individuals of F4 population derived from a cross between an elite cultivar Punjab-14 and PAUBG-6. This population was phenotyped under net-house conditions for three years 2018, 2019, and 2021. The linkage map consisting of 15 linkage groups comprising 3,144 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers was used to detect the QTLs for nine traits. A total of 50 QTLs for these traits were detected which were distributed on 11 chromosomes. The QTLs explained 5.09–29.82% of the phenotypic variance. The highest logarithm of the odds (LOD) score for a single QTL was 8.68 and the lowest was 2.50. For the earliness related traits, a total of 22 QTLs were detected. For the fruit related traits, a total of 16 QTLs and for seed related traits, a total of 12 QTLs were detected. Out of 50 QTLs, 20 QTLs were considered as frequent QTLs (FQ-QTLs). The information generated in this study is very useful in the future for fine-mapping and marker-assisted selection for these traits in bitter gourd improvement program.
Highlights
Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) is one of the important vegetable crops, known as bitter cucumber, karela, bitter melon, and African pear (Basch et al, 2003)
We identified a total of 50 putative QTLs located on 10 chromosomes using the F4 population from Punjab-14 and PAUBG-6
We identified three QTLs for the DFF trait in which one QTL was detected as frequent QTLs (FQ-QTLs)
Summary
Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) is one of the important vegetable crops, known as bitter cucumber, karela, bitter melon, and African pear (Basch et al, 2003). This vegetable crop belongs to family Cucurbitaceae and genus Momordica having chromosome number 2x = 2n = 22. A few quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been reported in bitter gourd relevant to yield component traits (fruit weight, length, and diameter) and earliness (Kole et al, 2012; Wang and Xiang, 2013; Cui et al, 2018; Rao et al, 2018, 2021)
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