Germination

Population

Agronomy

Falling Number

Sprouting

Cultivar

Germplasm

Biology

Preharvest

Medicine

Dormancy

Horticulture

Postharvest

Environmental health

Frontiers in Plant Science

Preharvest sprouting (PHS), the germination of grain on the mother plant under cool and wet conditions, is a recurring problem for wheat farmers worldwide. α-amylase enzyme produced during PHS degrades starch resulting in baked good with poor end-use quality. The Hagberg-Perten Falling Number (FN) test is used to measure this problem in the wheat industry, and determines how much a farmer's wheat is discounted for PHS damage. PHS tolerance is associated with higher grain dormancy. Thus, breeding programs use germination-based assays such as the spike-wetting test to measure PHS susceptibility. Association mapping identified loci associated with PHS tolerance in U.S. Pacific Northwest germplasm based both on FN and on spike-wetting test data. The study was performed using a panel of 469 white winter wheat cultivars and elite breeding lines grown in six Washington state environments, and genotyped for 15,229 polymorphic markers using the 90k SNP Illumina iSelect array. Marker-trait associations were identified ...

Genome-Wide Association Mapping for Tolerance to Preharvest Sprouting and Low Falling Numbers in Wheat