Plant & Animal Genomes XV Conference

January 13-17, 2007
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

A DArT Platform For High-Throughput Profiling In Durum Wheat

Peter Wenzl¹ , I Catizone^{1, 2} , E Huttner¹ , P Mantovani² , M Maccaferri ² , E DeAmbrogio³ , S Corneti² , M.C Sanguineti² , R Tuberosa² , A Kilian¹

¹  Diversity Arrays Technology Pty Ltd and Triticarte Pty Ltd, Yarralumla, Australia

²  Dept. of Agroenvironmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTA), University of Bologna, Italy

³  Società Produttori Sementi Bologna, Divisione Ricerca, Argelato (BO), Italy

The diversity Arrays Technology enables the simultaneous typing of several hundred polymorphic loci spread over the whole genome and, being sequence-independent, can be used also in species with limited sequence information. Herein, the results of the application of the DArT Technology to durum wheat are reported. The accessions (ca. 100) used to prepare DArT libraries were selected from a germplasm collection held at DiSTA (Bologna, Italy) to represent the genetic diversity present in the cultivated durum wheat germplasm (Maccaferri et al., 2005, Mol. Breed.) and include also parents of mapping populations recently developed. In addition, DArT markers from hexaploid wheat genome were screened for polymorphism among durum accessions and in total over1000 DArT markers have been identified and are available for genotyping durum wheat.
The DArT arrays were used to genotype a durum wheat mapping population of 176 RILs obtained from the cross between Colosseo (a cv. related to Creso, Italian - CIMMYT germplasm) and Lloyd (North American gene pool). The two parental lines highly differ as to yield potential, grain quality and disease resistance. In particular, the population will allow mapping major genes/QTLs for resistance to leaf rust (expressed at the adult plant stage) that have been shown to confer durable resistance since the ‘70s. An integrated SSR/DArT linkage map including 90 SSRs and 543 DArT markers (278 bread wheat-derived probes and 265 durum wheat probes) has been obtained.