| | From Kim and Cho 2006 Physiologia Plantarum 126: 494–502. |
In nature, different species exhibit remarkable diversity of leaf morphology, which is the result of adaptation to local environment for optimization of photosynthesis. Leaf shape, leaf size and leaf angle are important determinants of plant architecture, which significantly affect the photosynthetic potential. Big progress has been made in leaf development of Arabidopsis with mutants, however, little is known about the genetic basis of natural variation of leaf traits. In maize, different maize inbred lines show large natural variation in leaf traits. The NAM, designed to integrate the advantages of linkage analysis and association mapping, provide high resolution and statistical power to dissect complex quantitative traits. To dissect the genetic architecture of maize leaf, we collected the phenotypes for several important leaf traits in 5000 NAM lines in 12 environments across two years. Four questions in the context of genetic architecture will be deeply investigated: - What’s the genetic components controlling these important leaf traits? Whole genome joint linkage analysis will be conducted to identify the QTLs for these leaf traits. After projecting parental sequence to NAM, whole genome association analysis will dissect QTL to QTN.
- Does QTL is shared among families? Do alleles at each QTL have different functional effects distributed across founders?
- Are these leaf traits independently genetic controlled or genetic sharing to some extent?
- To what extent Epistasis and G by E interaction contribute to phenotypic variation of leaf traits?
This project is led by Feng Tian, collaborating with Jianming Yu at Kansas State University.
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