Genome-wide association study of yield components in spring wheat collection harvested under two water regimes in Northern Kazakhstan

Amalova A. Abugalieva S. Babkenov A. Babkenova S. Turuspekov Y.
27 July 2021 PeerJ Inc.

PeerJ
2021 #9

Background. Bread wheat is the most important cereal in Kazakhstan, where it is grown on over 12 million hectares. One of the major constraints affecting wheat grain yield is drought due to the limited water supply. Hence, the development of drought-resistant cultivars is critical for ensuring food security in this country. Therefore, identifying quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with drought tolerance as an essential step in modern breeding activities, which rely on a marker-assisted selection approach. Methods. A collection of 179 spring wheat accessions was tested under irrigated and rainfed conditions in Northern Kazakhstan over three years (2018, 2019, and 2020), during which data was collected on nine traits: heading date (HD), seed maturity date (SMD), plant height (PH), peduncle length (PL), number of productive spikes (NPS), spike length (SL), number of kernels per spike (NKS), thousand kernel weight (TKW), and kernels yield per m² (YM2). The collection was genotyped using a 20,000 (20K) Illumina iSelect SNP array, and 8,662 polymorphic SNP markers were selected for a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify QTLs for targeted agronomic traits. Results. Out of the total of 237 discovered QTLs, 50 were identified as being stable QTLs for irrigated and rainfed conditions in the Akmola region, Northern Kazakhstan; the identified QTLs were associated with all the studied traits except PH. The results indicate that nine QTLs for HD and 11 QTLs for SMD are presumably novel genetic factors identified in the irrigated and rainfed conditions of Northern Kazakhstan. The identified SNP markers of the QTLs for targeted traits in rainfed conditions can be applied to develop new competitive spring wheat cultivars in arid zones using a marker-assisted selection approach. Copyright 2021 Amalova et al.

Common wheat , Drought tolerance , GWAS , Marker-trait associations , Quantitative trait loci

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Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology, Almaty, Kazakhstan
A.I. Barayev Research and Production Centre of Grain Farming, Akmola Region, Shortandy, Kazakhstan
Faculty of Agrobiology, Kazakh National Agrarian University, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology
Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology
A.I. Barayev Research and Production Centre of Grain Farming
Faculty of Agrobiology

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