The inheritance of β-glucan concentration in three oat (Avena sativa L.) crosses

Abstract

Several reports have indicated that oat β-glucans may play an important role in reducing the incidence of degenerative diseases in humans. However, little information has been published on the inheritance of β-glucan concentration in oat. The development of new cultivars with improved β-glucan concentration would be simplified if the mode of inheritance is understood. Three experiments, each using two parental lines and their F1, F2, F3, BC1F2 and BC2F2 generations, were carried out to determine the inheritance of β-glucan concentration. The results indicate that β-glucan concentration is controlled by a minimum of two or three factor pairs with a predominantly additive type of gene action. In the majority of the generations, β-glucan concentration was found to be positively correlated with protein content and negatively correlated with oil content. It was not correlated with grain yield, number of panicles/plant, or number of kernels per panicle. The broad-sense heritability of β-glucan concentration ranged from 0.45 to 0.58 in the F2, and from 0.48 to 0.56 in the F3 generations, suggesting that it may be relatively easy to develop new oat cultivars with high- or low-β-glucan concentration. Key words: Avena sativa, oat, β-glucan concentration, inheritance