Development of branchless watermelon near isogenic lines by marker assisted selection

Pruning is time-consuming and laborious in watermelon cultivation,which can not meet the needs for simplified cultivation in the future.The development of branchless lines will provide important germplasms for breeding watermelon varieties and is an important method for genetic improvement.In this study,the watermelon accession,Wu Cha Zao(WCZ)is a branchless inbred line that carries the branchless gene Clbl,which was used as the donor parent to develop branchless near isogenic lines(NILs).To construct the NILs of Clbl,WCZ crossed with the normal branching watermelon inbred line WT20 which was used as the recurrent parent.The co-segregating markers dCAPS10 and Indel1 with Clbl were used for foreground selection,and a total of 108 SSR markers was selected with good polymorphism between two parental lines for background selection which had relatively uniform distribution across 11 chromosomes.Using these markers to select individuals from the BC_(1)F_(1),BC_(2)F_(1),and BC_(2)F_(2) generations,three NILs with a proportion of recurrent parent genome(PRPG)>99%were finally obtained.The lateral branch and plant height phenotypes did not significantly differ between the NILs and WCZ,indicating that the NILs of Clbl under the genetic background of WT20 has been successfully developed.These results provide ideal materials for further in-depth analysis of the genetic mechanisms of lateral branch development and ideal plant architecture breeding in watermelon.

Development of Heat Tolerant Two-Line Hybrid Rice Restorer Line Carrying Dominant Locus of OsHTAS

In order to create novel germplasm resources for breeding heat tolerant variety,we transferred a dominant allele OsHTAS,previously characterized and cloned from a high-temperature tolerant local variety HT54,which was collected from the rice production area of southern China,into a high-temperature sensitive intermediate breeding line HT13 through six rounds of successive backcross by using marker-assisted selection.The molecular analysis showed that the recovery of genetic background of a resultant near isogenic line(NIL),MHT13,was around 99.8%.The OsHTAS gene introduced in the MHT13 expressed normally in the HT13 genetic background,mediating heat tolerance and phenotype similar to those of the donor parent HT54.The major agronomic traits of MHT13 resembled those of the recurrent parent HT13.Moreover,MHT13 had high general combining ability and its rice quality reached the grade 3 standard of edible high-quality rice issued by Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China,which greatly improved its application value in rice production.

Identification of loci and candidate genes controlling kernel weight in barley based on a population for which whole genome assemblies are available for both parents

Kernel weight(KW), together with kernel number per unit area, determines yield of cereal crops. Here,two barley recombinant inbred lines(RILs) populations with a shared parent were used to identify loci controlling KW. One is Baudin/AWCS276(BA) for which a linkage map was available. Several largeeffect QTL controlling KW were detected in this population. Another is Morex/AWCS276(MA). A linkage map with 5273 makers formed 1454 clusters, was constructed by the genotyping by sequence(GBS) data of 201 RILs from this population. A single marker was selected to represent each of the clusters and the linkage map constructed with these markers covers a total length of 1022.4 c M with an average interval of approximately 0.7 cM between loci. Three of the large-effect loci controlling KW(located on 2 HL, 6 HL,and 7 HL, respectively) identified from the BA population were also detected in the MA population under different environments. The locus on 6 HL was detected in each of the experiments conducted for both populations thus was selected for developing near isogenic lines(NILs). Apart from KW, the two isolines for each pair of the putative NILs obtained showed no significant difference for any of the morphological characteristics assessed. The average difference in KW between the isolines for all the NILs obtained was about 15% based on assessments under both glasshouse and field conditions. Taken advantage that high quality genome assemblies for both Morex and AWCS276 are available, we identified candidate genes underlying two of the three loci based on an orthologous analysis. The NILs developed and the candidate genes identified in this study should facilitate the cloning and functional analysis of genes regulating KW in barley.