“…Early seedling vigor is a complex trait, mainly distinguished by the rate of germination and rapid early growth of both the shoot and roots. Several seedling vigor QTLs have previously been identified with biparental populations (Cheng et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2017;Dimaano et al, 2020), recombinant inbred lines (Huang et al, 2004;Zhou et al, 2007;Xie et al, 2014;Singh et al, 2017) and association mapping studies (Dang et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2018). Seedling vigor QTLs have been detected using several different phenotypes, including germination index and germination rate (Wang et al, 2010), low-temperature vigor of germination (Najeeb et al, 2020), shoot length, root length, root number and weight of germinated seeds (Zhang et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2018;Dimaano et al, 2020).…”