Genotyping and lipid profiling of 601 cultivated sunflower lines reveals novel genetic determinants of oil fatty acid content

Abstract

Background: Sunflower is an important oilseed crop domesticated in North America approximately 4000 years ago. During the last century, oil content in sunflower was under strong selection. Further improvement of the oil properties achieved by modulating its fatty acid composition is one of the main directions in modern oilseed crop breeding. Results: We searched for the genetic basis of fatty acid content variation by genotyping 601 inbred sunflower lines and assessing their lipid and fatty acid composition. Our genome-wide association analysis based on the genotypes of 15,483 SNPs and the concentrations of 23 fatty acids, including minor fatty acids, revealed significant genetic associations for eleven of them. Identified genomic regions included novel loci on chromosomes 3 and 14 cumulatively, explaining up to 34.5% of the total variation of docosanoic acid (22:0) in sunflower oil.Conclusions: This is the first large scale implementation of high-throughput lipidomic profiling on sunflower germplasm characterization. This study contributes to the genetic characterization of Russian collections, which made a substantial contribution to the development of a sunflower as the oilseed crop worldwide and provides new insights into the genetic control of oil composition that can be implemented in future studies.

Dissecting the genetic architecture of sunflower head diameter using genome-wide association study

“…With the technological advances, the cost effective and easily reachable genotyping and sequencing opportunities have opened new perspectives to plant breeding and genetics programs by enabling genome-wide studies. Recently, a number of GWAS have been conducted on sunflower traits (27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36), resulting in hundreds of trait-associated loci. Among those studies, only Dowell et al (2019) (32) focused on the head diameter trait and used about 6,000 markers to detect associations with the head (disk) size by GWAS.…”

Very long-chain saturated fatty acids and diabetes and cardiovascular disease

“…Peanuts, macadamia nuts and canola oil have the most total VLSFA, with peanuts highest in 22 : 0 and 24 : 0 and canola oil highest in 20 : 0. Among the main commercial oils, sunflower oil has noticeably more 22 : 0 [2,3]. Other commercial oils, including corn, olive, soy, safflower, contain low amounts of 20 : 0.…”