GWAS for growth and wood quality traits in Eucalyptus: a SNP segment based-approach enhances the proportion of variance explained by associated SNPs.

BRUNO MARCO DE LIMA; CAPPA EDUARDO PABLO; ORZENIL BONFIM DA SILVA JUNIOR; CARLA GARCIA; ADRIANO ALMEIDA; SHAWN D. MANSFIELD; DARIO GRATTAPAGLIA

Florence

Conferencia; IUFRO Tree Biotechnology Conference; 2015

Despite the larger sample size used when compared to all previous GWAS studies in trees, and a genome-wide coverage with high marker density, our results show that the complexity of most traits with the exception of lignin related ones is such that only a small proportion of the variation could be explained the significant SNP-trait associations. Combining SNP markers into segments considerably increased the amount of phenotypic variance explained. We expect, however, that a genomis prediction approach, where all marker effects are estimated and fit simultaneously into predictive models without rigorous significance tests, should prove more efficient to capture larger proportions of the variation for molecular breeding applications.