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Genetic dissection of root morphological traits as related to potassium use efficiency in rapeseed under two contrasting potassium levels by hydroponics

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Abstract

To reveal the genetic basis of potassium use efficiency (KUE) in rapeseed, root morphology (RM), biomass and KUE-related traits were measured in a recombinant inbred line population with 175 F7 lines that were subjected to high-potassium (HK) and low-potassium (LK) treatments by hydroponics. A total of 109 significant QTLs were identified to be associated with the examined traits. Sixty-one of these QTLs were integrated into nine stable QTLs. The higher heritability for RM and biomass traits and lower heritability for KUE-related traits, as well as nine stable QTLs for RM traits and only two for KUE-related traits, suggested that regulating RM traits would be more effective than selecting KUE traits directly to improve KUE by marker-assisted selection. Furthermore, the integration of stable QTLs identified in the HK, LK, high-nitrogen (HN) and low-nitrogen (LN) conditions gave 10 QTL clusters. Seven of these clusters were classified into major QTLs that explained 7.4%–23.7% of the total phenotypic variation. Five of the major QTL clusters were detected under all of the treated conditions, and four clusters were specifically detected under the LK and LN conditions. These common and specific QTL clusters may be useful for the simultaneous improvement of multiple traits by marker-assisted selection.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFD0100200), the Natural Foundation of Hubei Province (2018CFB246), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31501820), Rapeseed Industry Technology System (CARS-13), and the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Project (CAAS-ASTIP-2013-OCRI).

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  1. Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences/Key Laboratory of Biology and Genetic Improvement of Oil Crops, Ministry of Agriculture, Wuhan, 430062, China

    Xiaoling Dun, Jiaqin Shi, Huiping Liu, Jie Wang, Xinfa Wang & Hanzhong Wang

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  1. Xiaoling Dun
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Correspondence to Hanzhong Wang.

Electronic supplementary material

11427_2018_9503_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Figure S1 Phenotypic differences in the response of the two parents Zhongshuang11 and No. 73290 to K deficiency. (A) The images of Zhongshuang11 and No. 73290 from a test under seven K concentrations at the five-leaf stage. (B) Comparison of new leaves between Zhongshuang11 and No. 73290 under 6, 0.1 and 0.05 mM concentrations of K. (C) Differences in shoot fresh weight (SFW) between Zhongshuang11 and No. 73290.

11427_2018_9503_MOESM2_ESM.xls

Table S1 The summary of the 109 identified significant QTLs for all investigated traits across the three repetitions under the HK and LH conditions. Among these, data from E1 and E3 experiments under the HK treatment was equal to data from E1 and E3 experiments under HN (high nitrogen) treatment in Wang et al. (2017).

TABLE S2

. The summary of 61 significant QTLs integrated into 9 stable QTLs (sQTLs).

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Dun, X., Shi, J., Liu, H. et al. Genetic dissection of root morphological traits as related to potassium use efficiency in rapeseed under two contrasting potassium levels by hydroponics. Sci. China Life Sci. 62, 746–757 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-018-9503-x

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