Genome-wide association mapping in barley

Abstract

We tested the feasibility of carrying out association analysis between several morphologic and agronomic traits in 156 landraces of the Spanish Barley Core Collection (SBCC), for which polymorphic data were available. In a previous study, 225 barley accessions were genotyped with 73 markers, distributed along the barley genome. The 225 genotypes were assigned to four genetically distinct populations, clearly separating the Spanish landraces from other European materials. Association analysis was carried out only for 156 SBCC landraces and population structure was taken into account in the analysis. Some of the associations revealed with this landrace collection occurred in regions containing QTLs detected in biparental mapping populations, but we also found potentially new marker-trait associations that seem promising and could be studied in the future, in specific biparental crosses segregating for those regions. LM and AM can be used as complementary methods.