Introgression of QTL from Aegilops tauschii enhances yield-related traits in common wheat

To break the narrow diversity bottleneck of the wheat D genome, a set of Aegilops tauschii-wheat intro-gression (A-WI) lines was developed by crossing Ae. tauschii accession T015 with common wheat elite cultivar Zhoumai 18 (Zhou18). A high-density genetic map was constructed based on Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) markers and 15 yield-related traits were evaluated in 11 environments for detecting quantitative trait loci (QTL). A total of 27 environmentally stable QTL were identified in at least five environments, 20 of which were derived from Ae. tauschii T015, explaining up to 24.27% of the phenotypic variations. The major QTL for kernel length (KL), QKl-2D.5, was delimited to a physical interval of approximately 2.6 Mb harboring 52 candidate genes. Three Kompetitive Allele Specific PCR (KASP) markers were successfully developed based on nonsynonymous nucleotide mutations of candidate gene AetT093_2Dv1G100900.1 and showed that A-WI lines with the T015 haplotype had significantly longer KL than the Zhou18 haplotype across all 11 environments. Four primary valuable A-WIs with good trait performance and carrying yield-related QTL were selected for breeding improvement. The results will facilitate the efficient transfer of beneficial genes from Ae. tauschii into wheat cultivars to improve wheat yield and other traits.(c) 2023 Crop Science Society of China and Institute of Crop Science, CAAS. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).