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Construction of a single nucleotide polymorphism linkage map and identification of quantitative trait loci controlling heat tolerance in cowpea, Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp

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Abstract

Plant tolerance to heat or high temperature is crucial to crop production, especially in the situation of elevated temperature resulting from global climate change. Cowpea, Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp., is an internationally important legume food crop and an excellent pool of genes for numerous traits resilient to environmental extremes, particularly heat and drought. Here, we report a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genetic map for cowpea and identification of the loci controlling the heat tolerance in the species. The SNP map consists of 531 bins containing 4,154 SNPs grouped into 11 linkage groups, and collectively spans 1,084.7 cM, thus having a density of one SNP in 0.26 cM or 149 kb. The 11 linkage groups of the map were aligned to the 11 cowpea chromosomes. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping identified nine QTLs responsible for the cowpea heat tolerance on seven of the 11 chromosomes, with each QTL explaining 6.5—21.8% of heat tolerance phenotypic variation. Moreover, we aligned these nine QTLs to the cowpea genome. Each of the QTLs was positioned in a genomic region ranging from 209,000 bp to 12,590,450 bp, and the QTL with the largest effect (21.8%) on heat tolerance, qHT4-1, was located within an interval of only 234,195 bp. These results provide SNP markers useful for marker-assisted selection for heat tolerance and lay a foundation for cloning, characterization, and applications of the genes controlling the cowpea heat tolerance for heat tolerance genetic improvement in cowpea and related crops.

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Data availability

The consensus sequences of all SNPs are available in Supplementary Table S1. The genotypic and phenotypic data are available through the corresponding author, upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grant no. 2014-67013-21590 of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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  1. Brijesh Angira and Yang Zhang contributed equally to this study

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

    Brijesh Angira, Yang Zhang, Chantel F. Scheuring, Laura Masor, Julie R. Coleman, Yun-Hua Liu, Bir B. Singh, Hong-Bin Zhang, Dirk B. Hays & Meiping Zhang

  2. Institute of Food Crops, Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, 210014, Jiangsu, China

    Yadong Zhang

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  1. Brijesh Angira
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Angira, B., Zhang, Y., Scheuring, C.F. et al. Construction of a single nucleotide polymorphism linkage map and identification of quantitative trait loci controlling heat tolerance in cowpea, Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp. Mol Genet Genomics 297, 1481–1493 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-022-01928-9

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