Abstract
Limited or low Nitrogen is a wanting abiotic stress in maize mainly in Sub-Sahara Africa, affecting yields and quality development of maize crop. As an approach to getting a breeding solution; mapping of QTLs and understanding the heritability factor can provide useful information and guide for breeders in developing low nitrogen resilient maize. QTL mapping which is a molecular breeding component forms an actual basis in estimation of genomic regions associated to the expression of quantitative traits, and how heritable are such traits. Conducting a selection for Low N-tolerance is challenging due to its complex nature with strong interaction between genotypes and environments; therefore, marker assisted breeding is key to improving such complex traits, but at the same time requires markers associated with the trait of interest. In this study, three bi-parental populations were subjected to either or both low and optimum N conditions to detect and determine the QTLs heritability for grain yield and other agronomic traits. Essential to the study; genotype by environmental interaction, significance and heritability was examined for each population with most traits expressing low (<0.2) and moderate to high heritabilities (0.3>). These QTLs with high heritabilities across environments will be of great value for rapid introgression into maize populations using marker assisted selection approach. The study was a preliminary and therefore require further validation on heritability and fine mapping for them to be useful in MAS.
Highlights
Food security is a great challenge in the twenty first century in the developing world, in sub-Saharan Africa
A good heritability was recorded on grain yield (GY), Anthesis date (AD), plant height (PH), ear position (EPO) with low heritability recorded on plant aspect (PA) and ear aspect (EA)
Still on population two there is a moderate heritability on grain yield and low heritability >3.0 on other measured traits
Summary
Food security is a great challenge in the twenty first century in the developing world, in sub-Saharan Africa. Maize is one of the most important food crops in SSA and is the staple food with expected demand to increase in a sharp gradient (Jayne et al, 2012). The 2011-13 FAOSTAT showed that more than 2.1 million ha of Kenya’s 5.3 million ha of all crops’ harvested area was occupied by maize. Maize accounts for 40% of all crop area in Kenya. Maize is grown throughout the world, there are large differences in yields. To fulfill this projected demand, maize production in the future has to be realized predominantly on the existing cultivated land, since an expansion of cultivated land is severely limited because of population increase, environmental concerns, urbanization and diminishing water resources (Smale et al, 2013)
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