Producing sufficient food for nine billion people by 2050 will be constrained by soil salinity, especially in irrigated systems. To improve crop yield, greater understanding of the genetic control of traits contributing to salinity tolerance in the field is needed. Here, we exploit natural variation in exotic germplasm by taking a genome-wide association approach to a new nested association map...

With the ability to measure thousands of related phenotypes from a single biological sample, it is now feasible to genetically dissect systems-level biological phenomena. The genetics of transcriptional regulation and protein abundance are likely to be complex, meaning that genetic variation at multiple loci will influence these phenotypes. Several recent studies have investigated the role of g...

Ten populations of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana were collected along a north-south gradient in Norway and screened for microsatellite polymorphisms in 25 loci and variability in quantitative traits. Overall, the average levels of genetic diversity were found to be relatively high in these populations, compared to previously published surveys of within population variability. Six of the ...

Elite parental lines are of great significance to crop breeding. To discover unique genomic loci associated with excellent economic traits in the elite cabbage inbred-line '01-20', we performed comparisons of phenotypes as well as whole-genome insertion-deletion/simple sequence repeat loci between '01-20' and each of its five sister lines. '01-20' has a range of excellent agronomic traits, incl...

Quantitative trait loci affecting economically important traits were studied for eight large US Holstein grandsire families by using the granddaughter design. A total of 155 microsatellite markers located throughout the bovine genome were selected for the scan. The data analyzed include genotypes for 50 markers not previously reported. Results analyses of 105 marker genotypes reported previousl...

Quantitative trait loci affecting conformational type traits were studied in seven large grandsire families of US Holsteins using the granddaughter design and 16 microsatellite markers on 10 chromosomes. The most significant marker effect was marker BM203 (chromosome 27) for dairy form in a single grandsire family. A multivariate analysis for dairy form and milk yield was also conducted, and th...