A Development of SSR Linkage Map of Erianthus, Wild Relatives of Saccharum, for Breeding Improvement of Sugar Cane

Erianthus arundinaceus is a genus relative to sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), which indicates excellent persistence and excellent tolerance for cold, drought and poor soil conditions exhibiting great yield in the tropical and warm temperate zone in East Asia. Especially Japanese Erianthus genetic resources exhibit good winter hardiness for strong and long term condition of frost. Since the Erianthus can cross with sugar cane, the Japanese Erianthus is one of good genetic resources to improve the sugar cane for winter hardiness. However, the Japanese Erianthus genome analysis has not been performed yet, and crossing stability is not well understood. To construct Linkage markers is quite important for improving the cold and the other tolerances of sugar cane using Erianthus genome. Therefore, we performed next generation sequencing based simple sequence repeats (SSR) primer constructions, and successfully constructed a dense SSR based linkage map using a mapping population of Erianthus single crossing between a Japanese accession JW4 as a maternal parent and a Indonesian accession IJ76-349 as a paternal plant. Both maternal and paternal linkage maps were comprised by approximately each of 500 SSR markers covering 3500 cM with 60 linkage groups corresponding to their auto-hexaploid (2n=6X=60). We attempt to efficient selection using constructed SSR linkage markers for agricultural traits to hybrid sugar cane breeding selections concerning with poor environmental conditions, especially for excellent cold tolerance.