Dissecting the genetic basis of resistance to Soil-borne cereal mosaic virus (SBCMV) in durum wheat by bi-parental mapping and GWAS.

Soil-borne cereal mosaic virus (SBCMV), the causative agent of wheat mosaic, is a Furovirus challenging wheat production all over Europe. Differently from bread wheat, durum wheat shows greater susceptibility and stronger yield penalties, so identification and genetic characterization of resistance sources are major targets for durum genetics and breeding. The Sbm1 locus providing high level of resistance to SBCMV was mapped in bread wheat to the 5DL chromosome arm (Bass in Genome 49:1140-1148, 2006).

A MITE transposon insertion is associated with differential methylation at the maize flowering time QTL Vgt1.

One of the major quantitative trait loci for flowering time in maize, the Vegetative to generative transition 1 (Vgt1) locus, corresponds to an upstream (70 kb) noncoding regulatory element of ZmRap2.7, a repressor of flowering. At Vgt1, a miniature transposon (MITE) insertion into a conserved noncoding sequence was previously found to be highly associated with early flowering in independent studies.

Genetic dissection of maize phenology using an intraspecific introgression library.

Background: Collections of nearly isogenic lines where each line carries a delimited portion of a donor source genome into a common recipient genetic background are known as introgression libraries and have already shown to be instrumental for the dissection of quantitative traits. By means of marker-assisted backcrossing, we have produced an introgression library using the extremely early-flowering maize (Zea mays L.) variety Gaspé Flint and the elite line B73 as donor and recipient genotypes, respectively, and utilized this collection to investigate the genetic basis of flowering time and related traits of adaptive and agronomic importance in maize.

The genome of the domesticated apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.).

We report a high-quality draft genome sequence of the domesticated apple (Malus × domestica). We show that a relatively recent (>50 million years ago) genome-wide duplication (GWD) has resulted in the transition from nine ancestral chromosomes to 17 chromosomes in the Pyreae. Traces of older GWDs partly support the monophyly of the ancestral paleohexaploidy of eudicots.