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Diversity of Puroindoline genes and their association with kernel hardness in Chinese wheat cultivars and landraces

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Abstract

Kernel hardness is a key trait that greatly affects the milling and baking qualities of common wheat. Kernel hardness is largely controlled by Pina and Pinb genes. Here, we investigate the allelic diversity of Pina and Pinb genes in a collection of 107 Chinese wheat cultivars and landraces. The kernel hardness values of these accessions were determined in two field seasons (2016/2017 and 2017/2018 seasons), and they were strongly correlated between the 2 years, with hardness indexes ranging from 5.4 to 91.8. Five known Pina-D1 alleles and four known Pinb-D1 alleles were detected. In particular, we identified a novel Pina-null allele (designated Pina-D1z) with a 3382-bp deletion that can be detected by the new molecular marker Pina-N5. We also identified a Pina/Pinb double null allele containing a ~ 29-kb deletion. They are useful genotypes for kernel texture improvement. The most frequent genotypes in these accessions were Pina-D1a/Pinb-D1a and Pina-D1a/Pinb-D1b (39.3% and 34.6%, respectively), followed by Pina-D1a/Pinb-D1p (13.2%). A comparison of genotypes between the present study and previous studies suggests that Chinese wheat landraces have more allelic variations in the Pina gene than do cultivars. An association analysis of Puroindolines with kernel hardness shows that 15 Pina-D1 alleles and 6 Pinb-D1 alleles could be associated with hard-kernel phenotypes in common wheat. Notably, this study suggests that Chinese landraces are a valuable resource of genetic variability in Puroindoline genes and provides a deeper understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype association of Puroindoline genes.

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Funding

The work was supported by the National Genetically Modified New Varieties of Major Projects of China (2016ZX08010004-004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 31771418, 31570261), and the Key Project of Hubei Province (2017AHB041).

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  1. Yin Li

    Present address: Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 190 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

  2. Xiaoyan Li, Yin Li and Mengya Zhang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Genetic Engineering International Cooperation Base of Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, Key Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics of Chinese Ministry of Education, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Xiaoyan Li, Yin Li, Mengya Zhang, Xiaofen Yu, Rui Hu, Junli Chang, Guangxiao Yang, Yuesheng Wang & Guangyuan He

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  1. Xiaoyan Li
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Contributions

G.H., G.Y., X.L., and Y.L. conceived and designed the experiments. X.L. and M.Z. performed the experiments. M.Z. and X.Y. analyzed the data. J.C. and R.H. contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools. X.L., Y.L., G.H., and Y.W. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Guangxiao Yang, Yuesheng Wang or Guangyuan He.

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Li, X., Li, Y., Zhang, M. et al. Diversity of Puroindoline genes and their association with kernel hardness in Chinese wheat cultivars and landraces. Mol Breeding 39, 61 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-019-0967-6

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