“…The QTL meta‐analysis approach was applied in this study, which not only improved the accuracy and validity of our QTL mapping but also provided a new method for revealing the consensus QTLs from a consensus genetic map by comparing different map positions. Using this method, a number of studies have reported QTL meta‐analysis using BioMercator software (Dong et al., ; Said et al., ; Shinozuka, Cogan, Spangenberg, & Forster, ; Swamy & Sarla, ), and a large number of candidate genes have been mined in these studies. In the present study, candidate genes were screened from consensus, homologous candidate genes that were mined using the blast tool (Table ): three heading date cloned genes, OsMADS34 (Lin et al., ), Se14 (Yokoo et al., ) and ehd2 (Matsubara et al., ), are homologous with four candidate genes; two chlorophyll content‐related cloned genes, OsRopGEF10 (Yoo et al., ) and Sll1 (Zhang et al., 2009a), are homologous with six candidate genes; two drought tolerance cloned genes sHSP17.7 (Sato & Yokoya, ) and OsDREB1E (Chen et al., ) are homologous with four candidate gene; and two cold tolerance cloned genes OsMYB2 (Yang et al., ) and MYBS3 (Su et al., ) are homologous with five candidate gene.…”