Drought as a major abiotic stress often occurs from stem elongation to the grain filling stage of wheat in northern China. Plant height (PH) is a suitable trait to model the dissection of drought tolerance. The purposes of the present study were to validate molecular markers for PH developmental behavior and identify elite alleles of molecular markers. After the phenotyping of 154 accessions for PH dynamic development under well-watered (WW) and drought stressed (DS) conditions, and the genotyping of 60 SSR markers from six candidate chromosome regions related to PH found in our previous linkage mapping studies, both parameters PH and drought tolerance coefficient (DTC) calculated by the conditional analysis were used for association mapping. A total of 46 significant association signals (P < 0.01) were identified in 23 markers, and phenotypic variation ranged from 7 to 50%. Among them, four markers Xgwm261-2D, Xgwm495-4B, Xbarc109-4B and Xcfd23-4D were detected under both water regimes. Furthermore, 10 markers were associated with DTC, and four with both parameters PH and DTC at the same plant development stage. The results revealed different allelic effects of associated markers; for example, the 155 bp Xgwm495-4B allele was associated with a reduced height of -11.2 cm under DS and -15.3 cm under WW, whereas the 167 bp allele exhibited increased height effects of 3.9 and 8.1 cm, respectively. This study demonstrates a strong power of joint association analysis and linkage mapping for the identification of important genes in wheat.

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Selenium (Se) is a micronutrient essential for human and animal health. Due to the unbalanced distribution of Se resources in the world, Se deficiency is regarded as a major human health problem. Insufficient ingestion of Se in human caused a series of disease including Keshan disease and Kashin-Beck's disease. While some parts of the world was Se poisoning due to the Se ores on geological stratification or Se pollution. The using Se-enriched and/or hyperaccumulated green plants to treat these problems has acquired more and more attention worldwide from last decade. This paper describes current advances in the efforts of searching Se enriched plant genetic resources, clarifying the Se metabolism and accumulation mechanism in plants, and cloning key genes responsible for Se accumulation or hyper-accumulation and their transformation in plants.

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