Next Generation Platform for Dissection of Complex Traits and Genetic Improvement of Wheat

Wheat is an important staple crop and most widely grown cereal in the world. However, loss of genetic diversity in elite wheat breeding populations has limited future genetic gain on wheat improvement. Introducing the targeted trait from the synthetic hexaploid wheat (SHW) donor into adapted germplasm and generating novel recombinant genotypes to widen the existing primary gene pool of bread wheat has proven to be a practical strategy to incorporate allelic diversity into modern wheat. In this study, we describe the development of a large bread wheat nested association mapping (NAM) population that is designed to incorporate novel genetic diversity and take advantage of both linkage analysis and association mapping for dissection of complex quantitative traits. Fifty genetically diverse founder lines including 25 SHW and 25 elite lines were crossed to a common elite wheat line. This will allow the identification of valuable alleles “left behind” in elite cultivars due to minor effect that is difficult to detect and novel favorable alleles from SHW sources as well. The resulting population will provide a useful resource for not only dissection of genetic architecture of complex traits with higher statistical power and higher resolution but also identification of pre-breeding germplasm for future wheat breeding program.