Quantitative Genomic Analysis of Leaf Architecture in Sorghum.

Quantitative Genomic Analysis of Leaf Architecture in Sorghum

Marcus O. Olatoye*, Sophie Bouchet, Ram Perumal, Tesfaye Tesso, Geoffrey P. Morris Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.

Sorghum is an important crop in many agroclimatic regions worldwide, and has adapted to a wide range of conditions. This makes it an important crop for food security in the face of climate change for smallholder farmers in developing countries. Accordingly, global sorghum germplasm exhibits substantial variation in agroclimatic traits—traits that differ in germplasm from different agroclimatic zones—including many aspects of leaf and panicle architecture. Currently, our ability to improve sorghum adaptation and transfer useful alleles across different genetic backgrounds is constrained by our limited knowledge of the genomic regions that underlie agroclimatic traits. Nested Association Mapping (NAM), which uses multiple biparental families linked by a common parent, can improve dissection of agroclimatic traits by reducing the confounding effects of population structure and increasing the frequency of rare alleles. A sorghum NAM population comprised of 10 families and almost 2,500 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) has been developed and genotyped at approximately 100,000 SNPs with Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS). The population was phenotyped for leaf erectness and leaf width in two contrasting environments (locations) in Kansas, semi arid (Hays) and humid continental (Manhattan). Significant genotypic variation for these traits was observed. Association and joint linkage mapping confirmed several previously identified quantitative trait loci (QTL) and revealed many new QTL for the leaf architecture traits. The QTL identified will be helpful in marker-assisted selection for better adaptation and yield.

Keywords: Sorghum, adaptive traits, NAM, association studies, QTL.