Applying GWAS on four Eucalyptus species of MERCOSUR breeding programs.

PAMELA V. VILLALBA; NATALIA C. AGUIRRE; JUAN RIVAS; GARCIA MARTIN N.; MARIA CAROLINA MARTINEZ; CINTIA ACUÑA; JAVIER LOPEZ; JUAN LOPEZ; PABLO S. PATHAUER; PALAZZINI, DINO A.; LEONEL HARRAND; JAVIER OBERSCHELP; MARTIN MARCÓ; ESTEBAN F. CISNERO; ROCIO CARRERAS; JUANA MOGLIA; CARLOS AREVALOS; ELIZAUL J; HORACIO ESTEBAN HOPP; JOSÉ RODRIGUEZ; GUSTAVO MALMELLI; MAURICIO MORAN; DARIO GRATTAPAGLIA; EDUARDO P. CAPPA; MARCUCCI POLTRI, SUSANA N.

Raleigh

Conferencia; IUFRO Tree Biotechnology Conference; 2019

North Carolina State University

In the context of a cooperation project between the European Union and MERCOSUR (MINCYT-UEEuropeAid/136-457: Accelerated selection of Eucalyptus for bioenergy from the forest-breeding programs of MERCOSUR) high-throughput phenotype and genotype platforms were used for the application of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS). The GWAS is an interesting strategy for the identification of genes and polymorphisms responsible for long-range phenotypic variation related to breeding purposes.A total of 2661 individuals, that belong to four populations of: E. grandis (689 trees from Paraguay), E. tereticornis (700 trees from Uruguay), E. camandulensis and E. dunnii (586 and 686 from Argentina), were genotyped with the commercial EUChip60K chip (NEOGEN, USA). All populations belong to origins and backgrounds trials with the exception of the Paraguay clonal trial. After being filtered by minor allele frequency (MAF) lower than 0.05 and a percentage of missing data up to 10%, a mean of 18149 SNP markers was informative for the different populations (with a range from 11239 SNP for E. dunnii to 21547 SNP for E. grandis). Phenotype data using NIR and classical measurements for growth, physical and good quality traits were used in the association analyses. They were carried out with a mixed linear model (rrBLUP R-package) considering both the population structure by Discriminant Analysis of Principal Components (DAPC, adegenet R-package) and, genetic relationships among trees (Synbreed R-package). A total of 101 Marker-trait associations were found after false discovery rate (FDR) for multiple comparisons (p