A rapid high-resolution genome-wide strategy for molecular mapping of major QTL(s)/gene(s) regulating important agronomic traits is vital for in-depth dissection of complex quantitative traits and genetic enhancement in chickpea. The present study for the first time employed a NGS-based whole-genome QTL-seq strategy to identify one major genomic region harbouring a robust 100-seed weight QTL us...

Functional mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL) has embedded the biological mechanisms and processes of dynamic traits in the statistical method of QTL mapping. Although the statistical model for functional mapping has been well developed in inbred lines, it has not been proposed in a full-sib family, in which the number of alleles may vary over loci and the linkage phases are usually unkno...

Environment-specific quantitative trait loci (QTL) refer to QTL that express differently in different environments, a phenomenon called QTL-by-environment (Q × E) interaction. Q × E interaction is a difficult problem extended from traditional QTL mapping. The mixture model maximum-likelihood method is commonly adopted for interval mapping of QTL, but the method is not optimal in handling QTL in...

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is often exposed to cool temperatures during spring planting in temperate climates. A better understanding of genetic pathways regulating chilling tolerance will enable breeders to develop varieties with improved tolerance during germination and young seedling stages. To dissect chilling tolerance, five assays were developed; one assay for the germination stage, one assay...

Increasing grain yield by the selection for optimal plant architecture has been the key focus in modern maize breeding. As a result, leaf angle, an important determinant of plant architecture, has been significantly improved to adapt to the ever-increasing plant density in maize production over the past several decades. To extend our understanding on the genetic mechanisms of leaf angle in maiz...

Fine mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL) from previous linkage studies was performed on pig chromosomes 1, 4, 7, 8, 17, and X which were known to harbor QTL. Traits were divided into: growth performance, carcass, internal organs, cut yields, and meat quality. Fifty families were used of a F2 population produced by crossing local Brazilian Piau boars with commercial sows. The linkage map co...

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) breeding programs strive to increase grain yield; however, the progress is hampered due to its quantitative inheritance, low heritability, and confounding environmental effects. In the present study, a winter wheat population of 159 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) was evaluated in six trials under rainfed, terminal drought, and fully-irrigated conditions, over four ...

Beavis’ (1998) study on “power, precision, and accuracy” of QTL mapping is a classic. His work (first reported at a symposium in 1994) was the first demonstration of the effects of small sample sizes on the reliability of QTL mapping. This work demonstrated that when sample sizes (n) were small, power to detect true QTL was low, and the bias in the estimated proportion of the genetic variance e...

We present a flexible parallel implementation of the exhaustive grid search algorithm for multidimensional QTL mapping problems. A generic, parallel algorithm is presented and a two-level scheme is introduced for partitioning the work corresponding to the independent computational tasks in the algorithm. At the outer level, a static blockcyclic partitioning is used, and at the inner level a dyn...