Population Structure and Association Analysis of Bolting, Plant Height, and Leaf Erectness in Spinach

Abstract

<jats:p>Spinach (<jats:italic>Spinacia oleracea</jats:italic> L.) is an important vegetable worldwide with high nutritional and health-promoting compounds. Bolting is an important trait to consider to grow spinach in different seasons and regions. Plant height and leaf erectness are important traits for machine harvesting. Breeding slow bolting, taller, and more erect spinach cultivars is needed for improved spinach production. A total of 288 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) spinach accessions were used as the association panel in this research. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovered through genotyping by sequencing (GBS) were used for genotyping. Two structured populations and the admixtures were inferred for the 288 spinach accession panel using STRUCTURE and MEGA. Association mapping was conducted using single-marker regression (SMR) in QGene, and general linear model (GLM) and mixed linear model (MLM) built in TASSEL. Three SNP markers, AYZV02001321_398, AYZV02041012_1060, and AYZV02118171_95 were identified to be associated with bolting. Eight SNP markers, AYZV02014270_540, AYZV02250508_2162, AYZV02091523_19842, AYZV02141794_376, AYZV02077023_64, AYZV02210662_2532, AYZV02153224_2197, and AYZV02003975_248 were found to be associated with plant height. Four SNP markers, AYZV02188832_229, AYZV02219088_79, AYZV02030116_256, and AYZV02129827_197 were associated with erectness. These SNP markers may provide breeders with a tool in spinach molecular breeding to select spinach bolting, plant height, and erectness through marker-assisted selection (MAS).</jats:p>

Minor alleles are associated with white rust (Albugo occidentalis) susceptibility in spinach (Spinacia oleracea)

“…Our data partitioning were not based on the regional identity of the accessions. The accessions included in each segment showed regional heterogeneity in WR resistance and other previously identified phenotypic features (Supplementary Table ST1; https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/search.aspx) 14,65,66 . It was not clear in our study whether the partitioning that concentrated the risk alleles to a 25% subset of the population may also have experienced a low mapping resolution, such that many valid signals in the GWA went undetected in the basic allelic tests.…”

A review on the genetic resources, domestication and breeding history of spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.)

“…Breeding for abiotic stress tolerance Spinach has been investigated for its tolerance to abiotic factors such as water stress (Zuccarini and Savé 2016;Ors and Suarez 2017), salinity and osmotic stress (Bagheri et al 2015;Suarez 2016, 2017;Ferreira et al 2018), heavy metal stress (Fagioni et al 2009;Bagheri et al 2015) and temperature stress (Mogren et al 2015;Chitwood et al 2016;Ors and Suarez 2016). Two genes involved in tolerance to osmotic stress have been identified (Weretilnyk and Hanson 1988;Burnet et al 1995;Hibino et al 2002), but in general the genetics of tolerance against abiotic stresses is rather understudied in spinach.…”

“…Recently, Cai et al (2018) identified a major QTL and three candidate genes associated with leaf colour. Ma et al (2016) identified SNP markers related to petiole colour, leaf texture and leaf margin shape, while Chitwood et al (2016) reported SNP markers associated with leaf erectness, plant size and bolting. A better understanding of the mechanisms involved in bolting time is important in spinach breeding as it would enable the development of bolting-resistant cultivars with an extended period of leaf production.…”

Developing Growth‐Associated Molecular Markers Via High‐Throughput Phenotyping in Spinach

“…On the other hand, analysis of the associated signals for the manually collected bolting-related measurements resulted in the identification of several significant markers at 13 loci for DAS kf , 10 for DAS pol , and 12 for DAS bolt . Chitwood et al (2016) identified three SNP markers related to bolting by using a similar population derived from the USDA-NPGS. However, those markers were not localized at the same loci as the markers identified in the current study, perhaps because environmental conditions such as photoperiod might have influenced the bolting rates at different locations (Chun et al, 2000).…”