Poster

Yahya Rauf ¹, Abdullah FNU ², Luke Whitely ², Junli Zhang ¹, Daniel Hathcoat ², Geraldine Opena ², Jackie Rudd ¹, Shuyu Liu ^1,2
1. Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center, 6500 W Amarillo Blvd, Amarillo, 79106, Texas, United States
2. Department of Soil and Crop Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843, United States
Corresponding author: Shuyu Liu, Shuyu.Liu@ag.tamu.edu

Rauf, Yahya

yahyaagri@yahoo.com

Fusarium head blight (FHB) primarily caused by the fungal pathogen Fusarium graminearum is a devastating wheat disease causing significant losses in grain yield and quality. It infects wheat spikes and gradually causes discoloration and deterioration of grain, and contamination with mycotoxins, mainly deoxynivalenol (DON). FHB resistance is very complex due to its quantitative nature of inheritance and highly influenced by the environment, genetics backgrounds, susceptibility genes, and epistasis. We were interested to investigate and track the genetic sources of resistance to FHB disease components (severity, incidence, Fhb-index, FDK, and DON) and kernel traits (area, perimeter, length, width, TKW) in Texas wheat breeding pipeline. A set of 97 and 195 lines from breeding nurseries in 2024 and 2025, respectively were evaluated for FHB using a randomized complete block design in College Station, TX. Kernel traits were collected using the hp Scanjet G4010 photo scanner for image capturing and GrainScan v3. software for image analysis. Genomic libraries were sequenced and raw reads were aligned to the IWGSC RefSeq genome v2.1 using for SNP calling. Genomic sequences were filtered at 1% minor allele frequency and 5% heterozygosity which finally retained 109,323 and 55,051 polymorphic SNP markers for 2024 and 2025 mapping panels, respectively. To identify significant genomic regions associated with phenotyping traits, Blink, FarmCPU and MLMM models were implemented using the R package GAPIT version 3.5. Principal component analysis revealed that the first two components explained 62 to 67% phenotypic variations for Scab2024 and Scab2025 panels, respectively. Seed traits were highly correlated with r values ranging from 0.60-0.89 in Scab2024 and 0.37-0.94 in Scab2025. For disease components, INC and SEV had significant correlation (r=0.61), FDK correlated with seed length, SEV (r=0.32), and INC (r=0.4) in 2024. FDK correlated with seed length and SEV (r=0.26) in 2025. FDK had significant correlation with DON in both years (r =0.52 and 0.33). Breeding lines in both panels had high relatedness due to narrow genetic basis and common pedigrees in the breeding program. We identified one significant marker trait association (MTA) for FDK on 2B and four MTAs for seed traits (TWK, Length) on 2B, 3D, 7A in Scab2024 nurseries. For Scab2025 nurseries six significant MTAs were detected for DON and Severity on chromosomes 1A, 3B, 3D, 5D, 7D, while four MTAs for seed traits (Area, Length, TKW) on chromosomes 1A and 7B. S1A-102123595 maker in Scab2025 can be a pleiotropic QTL for seed traits (Area, Peri, length). Based on physical position S3B-688281453 potentially represents a new locus other than Fhb1 gene on chromosome 3B. The identified significant SNPs could reduce DON by 1.7 to 8.8 ppm. Texas wheat breeding lines potentially carry some unique resistances for FHB.

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