Genetic Mapping of Powdery Mildew Resistance Genes in Wheat Landrace ‘Guizi 1’ Using Genotyping-By-Sequencing

Abstract

Wheat powdery mildew (Pm), caused by Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici (Bgt), is a destructive disease of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) worldwide that causes severe yield losses. Resistant wheat cultivars easily lose effective resistance against newly emerged Bgt strains; therefore, identifying new resistance genes is necessary for breeding resistant cultivars. ‘Guizi 1’ is a Chinese wheat cultivar with effective moderate and stable resistance against powdery mildew. A genetic analysis indicated that powdery mildew resistance in ‘Guizi 1’ was controlled by a single dominant gene, designated PmGZ1. In total, 110 F2 individual plants and the 2 parents were used for genotyping-by-sequencing, which produced 23,134 high-quality single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The SNP distributions on the 21 chromosomes ranged from 134 on chromosome 6D to 6,288 on chromosome 3B. Chromosome 6A has 1,866 SNPs, among which 16 are located in a physical region between positions 307,802,221 and 309,885,836 in an approximate 2.3-cM region, which possessed the greatest SNP density. The average map distance between SNP markers was 0.1 cM. A quantitative trait locus with a significant epistatic effect on powdery mildew resistance was mapped to Chromosome 6A. The LOD value of PmGZ1 reached 34.8, and PmGZ1 was located within the confidence interval marked by chr6a-307802221 and chr6a-309885836. The phenotypic variance explained by PmGZ1 was 74.7%. Four candidate genes (two each encoding TaAP2-A and actin proteins) were annotated as resistance genes. The present results provide valuable information for wheat genetic improvement, quantitative trait loci fine mapping, and candidate gene validation.