Presenters: Kate Jaggi
Authors: Kate Jaggi, Heather Warner, Eric Jellen, David Jarvis, Lauren Young, Amber Adams, Ryan Brady, Steven Jellen, Daniel Bertero, Peter Maughan
Faculty Advisor: Jeff Maughan
Institution: Brigham Young University
Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoaWilld., 2n= 4x= 36, AABB) is an orphaned cereal crop native to the South American Andes which has gained recent popularity primarily due to its highly nutritious grains, which contain high levels of protein and balanced amino acids. While it possesses many desirable agronomic traits, such as tolerance to harsh abiotic conditions, many of quinoa’s other traits are not suitable are not suitable for large-scale production outside of the Andean cradle where it was originally cultivated. Selective breeding for desirable traits such as large seed size and mass, thin seed coat (testa) thickness, branched or upright plant structure, high panicle density, and lack of trimethylamine (TMA) are potential accelerants to growing and harvesting quinoa more productively. Our purpose was to determine whether wild species related to quinoa, such as South American avian goosefoot,C. hircinum,and North American pitseed goosefoot,C. berlandierivar. boscianum, which are adapted to American regions outside of the Andes, can be utilized to improve the agricultural potential of quinoa by identifying candidate genes associated with desirable or undesirable quinoa traits. We measured recombination and assessed segregation with QTL mapping of genome-wide sequencing reads of the hybrid F2progeny in populations ‘Real x 1101 (C. hircinum)’ and ‘Real x 937 (C. berlandieri var. boscianum). ‘Real-1’ is a commercially cultivated quinoa variety from the Salares region of the Bolivian Altiplano; 1101 is a weedy strain from the Northern Argentinean Pampas region; and 937 is a weedy strain from Galveston Bay, Texas. Population R9 consisted of 154 F2individuals evaluated with 2,473 SNP loci and Population R11 consisted of 86 F2plants evaluated with 1,714 SNP markers. A significant locus affecting seed diameter was identified using MapQTL6 on chromosome 2A.