Abstract

An improved understanding of how to manipulate the accumulation and enrichment of mineral elements in aboveground plant tissues holds promise for future resource efficient and sustainable crop production. The objectives of this study were to (a) evaluate the influence of Fe regimes on mineral element concentrations and contents in the maize shoot as well as their correlations, (b) examine the predictive ability of physiological and morphological traits of individual genotypes of the IBM population from the concentration of mineral elements, and (c) identify genetic factors influencing the mineral element composition within and across Fe regimes. We evaluated the concentration and content of 12 mineral elements in shoots of the IBM population grown in sufficient and deficient Fe regimes and found for almost all mineral elements a significant (α = 0.05) genotypic variance. Across all mineral elements, the variance of genotype*Fe regime interactions was on average even more pronounced. High prediction abilities indicated that mineral elements are powerful predictors of morphological and physiological traits. Furthermore, our results suggest that ZmHMA2/3 and ZmMOT1 are major players in the natural genetic variation of Cd and Mo concentrations and contents of maize shoots, respectively.

Highlights

  • A better understanding of processes and genes regulating mineral element uptake and how to manipulate the concentrations of mineral elements in aboveground plant tissues holds promise for future resource-efficient and sustainable crop production (Stein et al, 2017) as well as for bio-fortification towards alleviating global malnutrition

  • The broad sense heritabilities (H2) of the concentrations of mineral elements for the sufficient and deficient Fe regime were with a range from 0.39 to 0.95 slightly higher than H2 across both Fe regimes, whereas the opposite trend was observed for the mineral element contents

  • Our results suggest that the shoot ionome is under tight genetic control, and that strong interactions of a genotype with the environment, in our case the Fe regime, are driving the variation for the concentration as well as the content of mineral elements

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Summary

Introduction

A better understanding of processes and genes regulating mineral element uptake and how to manipulate the concentrations of mineral elements in aboveground plant tissues holds promise for future resource-efficient and sustainable crop production (Stein et al, 2017) as well as for bio-fortification towards alleviating global malnutrition (http://www.harvestzinc.org/harvestplus). Studies on the composition of plant mineral elements are referred to as ionomics (Lahner et al, 2003). Ionomic profiling is amenable to high-throughput phenotyping, which when coupled with quantitative genetic approaches such as quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping or genome wide association studies becomes a powerful tool for gene discovery (Baxter, Gustin, Settles, & Hoekenga, 2013). The majority of such studies has been performed in model plants Despite the important role of the mineral elements during the vegetative development of plants, no earlier study examined the inheritance of the shoot ionome of a C4 species

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