Given that climate change is expected to significantly increase temperatures in wheat production regions, it is critical to improve the crop’s ability to increase grain yield with less water. This would require increasing annual wheat yield by at least 1.6% per year, which is substantially higher than historical rates of yield increase for wheat, estimated at about 1% per year. With a growing world population and increasing consumption per capita, food production needs to increase by 70% to be able to meet the demands projected for 2050. It is also the most important crop in Australia, with grain production of about 25 million tonnes per year. Wheat is the second most important cereal crop worldwide. This commercial affiliation does not alter our adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: PW is affiliated with the commercial organization Corteva AgriscienceTM. Corteva AgriscienceTM provided support in form of salaries for authors (PW) and genotyping of the accessions used in this study but did not have any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The raw phenotypic and genotypic data files are available from Figshare (DOI: 10.25909/5becfa45c176f).įunding: The authors thank DuPont Pioneer and the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Genetic Diversity and Molecular Breeding for Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate (project number IH130200027) for financial support. Received: NovemAccepted: JanuPublished: February 4, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Garcia et al.
PLoS ONE 14(2):Įditor: Aimin Zhang, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology Chinese Academy of Sciences, CHINA (2019) Genome-wide association mapping of grain yield in a diverse collection of spring wheat ( Triticum aestivum L.) evaluated in southern Australia. The low number of yield QTL in our study corroborate with other GWAS for yield in wheat, where most of the identified loci have very small effects.Ĭitation: Garcia M, Eckermann P, Haefele S, Satija S, Sznajder B, Timmins A, et al. The favorable haplotypes for yield at the 5A and 6B loci are widespread in Australian accessions with 112 out of 153 carrying the favorable haplotype at the 5A locus and 136 out of 146 carrying the favorable haplotype at the 6A locus, while the favorable haplotype at 4B is only present in 65 out of 149 Australian accessions. The 6B loci corresponded to the same region in both years. We identified one locus for yield per se in 2014 on chromosome 6B with QTCAT and three in 2015, on chromosomes 4B and 5A with GAPIT and 6B with QTCAT. Ten of these loci were associated with known genes that are routinely employed in marker assisted selection such as Ppd-D1 for maturity and Rht-D1 for plant height and seven of those were detected with both methods. We identified 17 loci with GAPIT and 25 with QTCAT. We used the 90K SNP array and two GWAS approaches (GAPIT and QTCAT) to identify loci associated with the different traits. The 568 accessions were grown in the field during the 20 seasons and measured for plant height, maturity, spike length, spike number, grain yield, plant biomass, HI and TGW. Here, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) using a wheat panel that includes landraces, synthetic hexaploids and other exotic wheat accessions to identify loci that contribute to increases in grain yield in southern Australia. The use of those exotic alleles is facilitated by having access to information on the association of specific genomic regions with desirable traits. Wheat landraces, wild relatives and other ‘exotic’ accessions are important sources of new favorable alleles.