Genome-wide association study of important agronomic traits within a core collection of rice ( Oryza sativa L.)

Background Cultivated rice ( Oryza sativa L.) is one of the staple food for over half of the world’s population. Thus, improvement of cultivated rice is important for the development of the world. It has been shown that abundant elite genes exist in rice landraces in previous studies. Results A genome-wide association study (GWAS) performed with EMMAX for 12 agronomic traits measured in both Guangzhou and Hangzhou was carried out using 150 accessions of Ting’s core collection selected based on 48 phenotypic traits from 2262 accessions of Ting’s collection, the GWAS included more than 3.8 million SNPs. Within Ting’s core collection, which has a simple population structure, low relatedness, and rapid linkage disequilibrium (LD) decay, we found 32 peaks located closely to previously cloned genes such as Hd1 , SD1 , Ghd7 , GW8 , and GL7 or mapped QTL, and these loci might be natural variations in the cloned genes or QTL which influence potentially agronomic traits. Furthermore, we also detected 32 regions where new genes might be located, and some peaks of these new candidate genes such as the signal on chromosome 11 for heading days were even higher than that of Hd1 . Detailed annotation of these significant loci were shown in this study. Moreover, according to the estimated LD decay distance of 100 to 350 kb on the 12 chromosomes in this study, we found 13 identical significant regions in the two locations. Conclusions This research provided important information for further mining these elite genes within Ting’s core collection and using them for rice breeding.