BACKGROUND: Resistance to Fusarium ear rot of @entity2829 is a quantitative and complex trait. Marker-trait associations to date have had small additive effects and were inconsistent between previous studies, likely due to the combined effects of genetic heterogeneity and low power of detection of many small effect variants. The complexity of inheritance of resistance hinders the use marker-assisted selection for ear rot resistance. RESULTS: We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for Fusarium ear rot resistance in a panel of 1687 diverse inbred lines from the USDA @entity2829 gene bank with 200,978 @entity302 while controlling for background genetic relationships with a mixed model and identified seven @entity302 ( @entity302 ) in six genes associated with disease resistance in either the complete inbred panel (1687 lines with highly unbalanced phenotype data) or in a filtered inbred panel (734 lines with balanced phenotype data). Different sets of @entity302 were detected as associated in the two different data sets. The alleles conferring greater disease resistance at all seven @entity302 were rare overall (below 16%) and always higher in allele frequency in tropical @entity2829 than in temperate dent @entity2829 . Resampling analysis of the complete data set identified one robust SNP association detected as significant at a stringent p-value in 94% of data sets, each representing a random sample of 80% of the lines. All associated @entity302 were in exons, but none of the genes had predicted functions with an obvious relationship to resistance to @entity364 . CONCLUSIONS: GWAS in a very diverse @entity2829 collection identified seven SNP variants each associated with between 1% and 3% of trait variation. Because of their small effects, the value of selection on these @entity302 for improving resistance to Fusarium ear rot is limited. Selection to combine these resistance alleles combined with genomic selection to improve the polygenic background resistance might be fruitful. The genes associated with resistance provide candidate gene targets for further study of the biological pathways involved in this complex disease resistance.

Genome-wide association study of Fusarium ear rot disease in the U.S.A. XXXX inbred line collection.

@entity364 :: ('MESH:D009181', 'Disease') :: ['fungal infection'] @entity302 :: ('MESH:D004827', 'Disease') :: ['single nucleotide polymorphisms', 'SNPs'] @entity2829 :: ('4577', 'Species') :: ['maize']
@entity2829 :: (4577,Species) :: ['maize']
