Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

LD Mapping In Barley: Insights Into The Genetic Architecture Of Agronomic Traits

Andreas Graner¹ , Grit Haseneyer¹ , Silke Stracke¹ , Hans-Peter Piepho²

¹  Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Corrensstr. 3, 06466 Gatersleben, Germany

²  University of Hohenheim, Fruwirthstr. 23, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany

A set of 224 spring barley accessions has been selected for analyses of phenotypic and genetic diversity, and to investigate association of candidate genes with selected agronomic traits. For phenotypic evaluation field trials were conducted in 2004 and 2005 to score plant height, thousand-grain weight, raw protein content, starch content and flowering time. For all traits broad sense heritabilities exceeded 0.90. For further association analysis, a set of seven candidate genes was selected that play a putative role in grain quality and the regulation of flowering time. As expected, a large degree of variation in sequence diversity, haplotype diversity and LD was detected in the seven candidate genes analyzed. Based on re-sequencing data associations between phenotypic variation and DNA polymorphism in several candidate genes were studied. Data on phenotypic, genotypic and genetic background information were used to build a model for association analysis and to identify genes that contribute to the variation of grain quality traits. Significant associations were detected for flowering time thousand-grain weight, as well as starch and raw protein content.