Combining ability analysis over F1-F5 generations in diallel crosses of bread wheat
SummaryCombining ability studies for grain yield and its primary component traits in diallel crosses involving seven diverse wheat cultivars of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) over generations F1-F5 are reported. The general and specific combining ability variances were significant in all generations for all the traits except specific combining ability variance for number of spikes per plant in the F5. The ratio of general to specific combining ability variances was significant for all the traits except grain yield in all the generations. This indicated an equal role of additive and non-additive gene effects in the inheritance of grain yield, and the predominance of the former for its component traits. The presence of significant specific combining ability variances in even the advanced generations may be the result of an additive x additive type of epistasis or evolutionary divergence among progenies in the same parental array. The relative breeding values of the parental varieties, as indicated by their general combining ability effects, did not vary much over the generations. The cheap and reliable procedure observed for making the choice of parents, selecting hybrids and predicting advanced generation (F5) bulk hybrid performance was the determination of breeding values of the parents on the relative performance of their F2 progeny bulks.
Genetic dissection of heterosis using epistatic association mapping in a partial NCII mating design
Heterosis refers to the phenomenon in which an F1 hybrid exhibits enhanced growth or agronomic performance. However, previous theoretical studies on heterosis have been based on bi-parental segregating populations instead of F1 hybrids. To understand the genetic basis of heterosis, here we used a subset of F1 hybrids, named a partial North Carolina II design, to perform association mapping for dependent variables: original trait value, general combining ability (GCA), specific combining ability (SCA) and mid-parental heterosis (MPH). Our models jointly fitted all the additive, dominance and epistatic effects. The analyses resulted in several important findings: 1) Main components are additive and additive-by-additive effects for GCA and dominance-related effects for SCA and MPH, and additive-by-dominant effect for MPH was partly identified as additive effect; 2) the ranking of factors affecting heterosis was dominance > dominance-by-dominance > over-dominance > complete dominance; and 3) increasing the proportion of F1 hybrids in the population could significantly increase the power to detect dominance-related effects, and slightly reduce the power to detect additive and additive-by-additive effects. Analyses of cotton and rapeseed datasets showed that more additive-by-additive QTL were detected from GCA than from trait phenotype, and fewer QTL were from MPH than from other dependent variables.
Evaluation of Three Hard Red Spring Wheat Crosses for Heterosis 1
Information on heterosis in wheat was summarized by Briggle (3). Theories on the genetic basis for heterosis and their implications also have been reviewed extensively by many workers (5) . Sinnott, Dunn, and Dobzhansky (9) state, "whether or not there is any heterosis at all in normally self-pollinated plants is an open problem." However, the review by Briggle (3) and data reported by Briggle et al. (4) indicate that heterosis does occur in wheat.