GWAS for main effects and epistatic interactions for grain morphology traits in wheat

Abstract

In the present study in wheat, GWAS was conducted for identification of marker trait associations (MTAs) for the following six grain morphology traits: (1) grain cross-sectional area (GCSA), (2) grain perimeter (GP), (3) grain length (GL), (4) grain width (GWid), (5) grain length-width ratio (GLWR) and (6) grain form-density (GFD). The data were recorded on a subset of spring wheat reference set (SWRS) comprising 225 diverse genotypes, which were genotyped using 10,904 SNPs and phenotyped for two consecutive years (2017-2018, 2018-2019). GWAS was conducted using five different models including two single-locus models (CMLM, SUPER), one multi-locus model (FarmCPU), one multi-trait model (mvLMM) and a model for Q x Q epistatic interactions. False discovery rate (FDR) [P value -log10(p) ≥ 5] and Bonferroni correction [P value -log10(p) ≥ 6] (corrected p value < 0.05) were applied to eliminate false positives due to multiple testing. This exercise gave 88 main effect and 29 epistatic MTAs after FDR and 13 main effect and 6 epistatic MTAs after Bonferroni corrections. MTAs obtained after Bonferroni corrections were further utilized for identification of 55 candidate genes (CGs). In silico expression analysis of CGs in different tissues at different parts of the seed at different developmental stages was also carried out. MTAs and CGs identified during the present study are useful addition to available resources for MAS to supplement wheat breeding programmes after due validation and also for future strategic basic research.