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Genetic dissection of maize seedling traits in an IBM Syn10 DH population under the combined stress of lead and cadmium

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Abstract

The heavy metals lead and cadmium have become important pollutants in the environment, which exert negative effects on plant morphology, growth and photosynthesis. It is particularly significant to uncover the genetic loci and the causal genes for lead and cadmium tolerance in plants. This study used an IBM Syn10 DH population to identify the quantitative trait loci (QTL) controlling maize seedling tolerance to lead and cadmium by linkage mapping. The broad-sense heritability of these seedling traits ranged from 65.8–97.3% and 32.0–98.8% under control (CK) and treatment (T) conditions, respectively. A total of 53 and 64 QTL were detected under CK and T conditions, respectively. Moreover, 42 QTL were identified using lead and cadmium tolerance coefficient (LCTC). Among these QTL, five and two major QTL that explained > 10% of phenotypic variation were identified under T condition and using LCTC, respectively. Furthermore, eight QTL were simultaneously identified by T and LCTC, explaining 5.23% to 9.21% of the phenotypic variations. Within these major and common QTL responsible for the combined heavy metal tolerance, four candidate genes (Zm00001d048759, Zm00001d004689, Zm00001d004843, Zm00001d033527) were previously reported to correlate with heavy metal transport and tolerance. These findings will contribute to functional gene identification and molecular marker-assisted breeding for improving heavy metal tolerance in maize.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. We would like to thank Michael Lee (Iowa State University) for providing the IBMSyn10 DH population. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871637 and 32001500).

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  1. Fengxia Hou and Xun Zhou contributed equally.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Biology and Genetic Improvement of Maize in Southwest Region, Maize Research Institute, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, 611130, China

    Fengxia Hou, Xun Zhou, Peng Liu, Guangsheng Yuan, Chaoying Zou, Guangtang Pan, Langlang Ma & Yaou Shen

  2. Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA

    Thomas Lübberstedt

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  1. Fengxia Hou
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  2. Xun Zhou
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Contributions

YS, LM, GP and TL conceived and designed the experiments; FH and XZ performed the experiments; FH and PL analyzed the data; GY and CZ contributed reagents, materials and analysis tools, respectively; FH and YS wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Langlang Ma or Yaou Shen.

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Hou, F., Zhou, X., Liu, P. et al. Genetic dissection of maize seedling traits in an IBM Syn10 DH population under the combined stress of lead and cadmium. Mol Genet Genomics 296, 1057–1070 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-021-01800-2

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