Identifying developmental QTL alleles with favorable effect on grain yield components under late‐terminal drought in spring barley MAGIC population

Abstract

Barley is the fourth most cultivated cereal worldwide, and drought is a major cause of its yield loss by negatively affecting its development. Hence, better understanding developmental mechanisms that control complex polygenic yield‐related traits under drought is essential to uncover favorable yield regulators. This study evaluated seven above‐ground yield‐related traits under well‐watered (WW) and late‐terminal drought (TD) treatment using 534 spring barley multiparent advanced generation intercross double haploid (DH) lines. The analysis of quantitative trait loci (QTL) for WW, TD, marker by treatment interaction, and drought stress tolerance identified 69, 64, 25, and 25 loci, respectively, for seven traits from which 15 loci were common for at least three traits and 17 were shared by TD and drought stress tolerance. Evaluation of allelic effects for a QTL revealed varying effect of parental alleles. Results showed prominent QTL located on major flowering time gene Ppd‐H1 with favorable effects for grain weight under TD when flowering time was not significantly affected, suggesting that this gene might be linked with increasing grain weight by ways other than timing of flowering under late‐terminal drought stress. Furthermore, a desirable novel QTL allele was identified on chromosome 5H for grain number under TD nearby sucrose transporter gene HvSUT2. The findings indicated that spring barley multiparent advanced generation intercross population can provide insights to improve yield under complex condition of drought.

Genome wide association study of Ethiopian barley for terminal drought stress tolerance under field and climate chamber conditions

“…GWAS have been used to investigate agro-physiological important traits in barley (Afsharyan et al 2023;Elbasyoni et al 2022;Li et al 2022;Thabet et al 2020;Wehner et al 2016a, b;Wehner et al 2015;Wójcik-Jagła et al 2018;Xiong et al 2023), but the presence of a high false positive rate result was the major challenge (Tibbs Cortes et al 2021). Beside the application of different p-values correction methods like FDR (Benjamini and Hochberg 1995) and Bonferroni methods, different GWAS models were developed to improve the computational power and efficiency.…”

“…Candidate genes associated with drought tolerance that influence grain yield and associated traits (Li et al 2022), and drought triggered environmental signals (Elbasyoni et al 2022) were also reported. Post flowering drought experiment also revealed QTLs influencing drought tolerance in barley (Afsharyan et al 2023).…”