Association mapping can quickly and efficiently dissect complex agronomic traits. Rapeseed is one of the most economically important polyploid oil crops, although its genome sequence is not yet published. In this study, a recently developed 60K Brassica Infinium® SNP array was used to analyse an association panel with 472 accessions. The single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the array were in silico mapped using ‘pseudomolecules’ representative of the genome of rapeseed to establish their hypothetical order and to perform association mapping of seed weight and seed quality. As a result, two significant associations on A8 and C3 of Brassica napus were detected for erucic acid content, and the peak SNPs were found to be only 233 and 128 kb away from the key genes BnaA.FAE1 and BnaC.FAE1. BnaA.FAE1 was also identified to be significantly associated with the oil content. Orthologues of Arabidopsis thaliana HAG1 were identified close to four clusters of SNPs associated with glucosinolate content on A9, C2, C7 and C9. For seed weight, we detected two association signals on A7 and A9, which were consistent with previous studies of quantitative trait loci mapping. The results indicate that our association mapping approach is suitable for fine mapping of the complex traits in rapeseed.

Allopolyploidy is an important speciation mechanism and is ubiquitous among plants. Brassica napus is a model system for studying the consequences of hybridization and polyploidization on allopolyploid genome. In this research, two sets of plant materials were used to investigate the transcriptomic and epigenetic changes in the early stages of allopolyploid formation. The first comparison was between a synthetic B. napus allotetraploid and its diploid progenitors, B. rapa (AA genome) and B. oleracea (CC genome). Using cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP) and methylation-sensitive amplification polymorphism (MSAP) approaches, ~4.09 and 6.84% of the sequences showed changes in gene expression and DNA methylation in synthesized B. napus compared to its diploid progenitors. The proportions of C-genome-specific gene silencing and DNA methylation alterations were significantly greater than those of A-genome-specific alterations. The second comparison was between amphihaploid and amphidiploid B. napus organs grown on synthesized dimorphic plants. About 0.73% of the cDNA-AFLP fragments and 1.94% of the MSAP fragments showed changes in gene expression and DNA methylation. We sequenced 103 fragments that differed in the synthetic/parental or the amphihaploid/amphidiploid cDNA-AFLP and MSAP comparisons. Sequence analysis revealed these fragments were involved in various biological pathways. Our results provided evidence for genome-wide changes in gene expression and DNA methylation occurring immediately after hybridization and polyploidization in synthetic B. napus. Moreover, this study contributed to the elucidation of genome doubling effects on responses of transcriptome and epigenetics in B. napus.

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