Biomedical and Biological Engineering | Article | Published 2011-02-23
Cotton is the world’s leading cash crop, but it lags behind other major crops for marker-assisted breeding that underlies a need for characterization, tagging, and utilization of existing natural polymorphisms in cotton germplasm collections. Previously, we conducted molecular genetic analyses in a global set of~ 1000 G. hirsutum accessions from Uzbek cotton germplasm collection, representing, at least, 37 cotton growing countries and 8 breeding ecotypes as well as wild landrace stock accessions. The important fiber quality (fiber length and strength, micronaire, uniformity, reflectance, elongation and ect.) traits were measured in two distinct environments of Uzbekistan and Mexico. This study allowed us to design an “association mapping”(mixed liner model-MLM) study to find biologically meaningful markertrait associations for important fiber quality traits in Upland cotton that accounts for population confounding effects. Several SSR markers associated with main fiber quality traits along with donor accessions were selected to be used for marker-assisted selection (MAS) programs. In this study, utilizing our previous results of association mapping in Uzbek cotton germplasm resources, with specific objective of introducing and enriching the currently-applied traditional breeding approaches with more efficient modern MAS tools in Uzbekistan, we began marker-assisted selection efforts using molecular markers associated with important fiber traits. For this purpose, we selected 1) major fiber quality trait–associated SSR markers and 2) donor genotypes that were identified in our previous studies. We selected 23 major (micronaire, fiber strength and …
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