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Hybrid larch heterosis: for which traits and under which genetic control?

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Abstract

Despite the interest foresters have for inter-specific hybrid trees, still little is known about their quantitative genetics. This is especially true for the hybrid (HL) between Larix decidua (EL) and L. kaempferi (JL). Long-term, well-designed, multi-site experiments are necessary to estimate the parameters required for HL breeding programs. This paper presents the results from a diallel mating trial between nine EL and nine JL, set up in three contrasted sites. Growth traits (height, circumference), quality traits (wood density, stem form, heartwood proportion), and bud flush were measured from plantation to up to 18 years after plantation. Wood density and heartwood proportion were assessed using increment cores. We did a spatial analysis to take into account environmental heterogeneity at the tree level, and we fitted a multi-trait, Bayesian MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) genetic model. Our study confirmed, in most situations, that HL expressed heterosis over its best parent for growth traits taking advantage of an early faster growth, with no loss in wood density. However, growth traits showed low levels of heritability. On the other hand, bud flush and stem flexuosity had high heritabilities, and wood density was clearly under JL control. Site-dependent heritabilities were expressed by EL. Additive genetic correlations were presented. The traits with high heritabilities showed high correlation between their performances in pure species and in hybridization, as well as high across-site correlations. The discussion focused on the interest of these genetic parameters for the hybrid larch breeding programs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely acknowledge staff of INRA experimental units (UE GBFOR and UE BIOGECO) who have established, maintained, and assessed the field trials as well as collected the increments cores. The authors thank Genobois platform technical staff who have prepared and X-rayed wood samples and provided microdensitometry profiles. Thanks also to Jarrod Hadfield for his kind help with the package MCMCglmm and to Pierre de Villemereuil, Luis Varona, and Sebastián Munilla for their advices with Bayesian statistics. F. Muñoz was partially funded by research grant MTM2013-42323-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and ACOMP/2015/202 from Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). F. Muñoz and L. Sánchez received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for research, technological development, and demonstration under grant agreement no. 284181 (“Trees4Future”). The authors also thank two anonymous reviewers and an associate editor for their comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, UR 0588 AGPF - Unité de recherche Amélioration, Génétique et Physiologie Forestières. Centre de recherche Val de Loire, Orléans, France

    Alexandre Marchal, Facundo Muñoz, Frédéric Millier, Leopoldo Sánchez & Luc E. Pâques

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  1. Alexandre Marchal
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  2. Facundo Muñoz
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  3. Frédéric Millier
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  5. Luc E. Pâques
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Correspondence to Luc E. Pâques.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Data archiving statement

Our datasets are being submitted to GnpIS INRA Repository and the accession numbers will be supplied once available. We acknowledge that the final acceptance of a manuscript into TGG is contingent on all relevant accession numbers being made available in text.

Additional information

Communicated by J. Beaulieu

Electronic supplementary material

Appendix 1

Description of the set-up and data (DOC 307 kb).

Appendix 2

Extra results (DOC 186 kb).

Appendix 3

Performances of the parents predicted by model M2 (DOC 283 kb).

Appendix 4

Comparison between the heritabilities estimated in this study and the heritabilities of the literature reviewed by Pâques (2013) (DOC 104 kb).

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Marchal, A., Muñoz, F., Millier, F. et al. Hybrid larch heterosis: for which traits and under which genetic control?. Tree Genetics & Genomes 13, 92 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-017-1177-1

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