Abstract
Improving drought stress tolerance of soybean could be an effective way to minimize the yield reduction in the drought prevailing regions. Identification of drought tolerance-related quantitative trait loci (QTLs) is useful to facilitate the development of stress-tolerant varieties. This study aimed to identify the QTLs for drought tolerance in soybean using a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population developed from the cross between a drought-tolerant ‘PI416937’ and a susceptible ‘Cheonsang’ cultivar. Phenotyping was done with a weighted drought coefficient derived from the vegetative and reproductive traits. The genetic map was constructed using 2648 polymorphic SNP markers that distributed on 20 chromosomes with a mean genetic distance of 1.36 cM between markers. A total of 10 QTLs with 3.52–4.7 logarithm of odds value accounting for up to 12.9% phenotypic variance were identified on seven chromosomes. Five chromosomes—2, 7, 10, 14, and 20—contained one QTL each, and chromosomes 1 and 19 harbored two and three QTLs, respectively. The chromosomal locations of seven QTLs overlapped or located close to the related QTLs and/or potential candidate genes reported earlier. The QTLs and closely linked markers could be utilized in maker-assisted selection to accelerate the breeding for drought tolerance in soybean.
Highlights
Soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.) is one of the major commodity crops worldwide for food and feed sources
We considered a few vegetative as well as reproductive traits, such as plant height (PH), the number of nodes on the main stem (NN), branches (BN) and pods (PN), biomass (BM), and leaf area (LA) for phenotyping and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers for genotyping the recombinant inbred line (RIL) population to identify quantitative trait locus (QTL) for drought tolerance
Various physiological and biochemical alterations, due to drought stress, have been identified in soybean plants [9,10,11,12] that may visibly reflect in traits like PH, nodes on main stem (NN), BN, PN, BM, and LA [13,14,15]
Summary
Soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.) is one of the major commodity crops worldwide for food and feed sources (http://faostat.fao.org/). The yield of many crops, including soybean, is challenged by global climate change [1]. Climate changes exacerbate the incidence of extreme weather patterns, such as erratic rainfall, elevated temperature, and the consequent drought stress, causing significant reductions in crop production [2]. Drought stress is a major abiotic stress that may cause more than 50% yield reduction in soybean [3]. Sensitivity of soybean plants to drought stress affects the global soybean yield because nearly 41% of the world’s land is dryland [4], and unpredictable climatic variability, including increased drought events, is experienced in many parts [5,6]. Acquisition of genetic information on drought tolerance at the reproductive stages of soybean is of great importance
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