Pinpointing Rcs3 for frogeye leaf spot resistance and tracing its origin in soybean breeding

Mol Breed. 2023 May 27;43(6):49. doi: 10.1007/s11032-023-01397-x. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Abstract

Frogeye leaf spot is a yield-reducing disease of soybean caused by the pathogen Cercospora sojina. Rcs3 has provided durable resistance to all known races of C. sojina since its discovery in the cultivar Davis during the 1980s. Using a recombinant inbred line population derived from a cross between Davis and the susceptible cultivar Forrest, Rcs3 was fine-mapped to a 1.15 Mb interval on chromosome 16. This single locus was confirmed by tracing Rcs3 in resistant and susceptible progeny derived from Davis, as well as three near-isogenic lines. Haplotype analysis in the ancestors of Davis indicated that Davis has the same haplotype at the Rcs3 locus as susceptible cultivars in its paternal lineage. On the basis of these results, it is hypothesized that the resistance allele in Davis resulted from a mutation of a susceptibility allele. Tightly linked SNP markers at the Rcs3 locus identified in this research can be used for effective marker-assisted selection.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11032-023-01397-x.

Keywords: Disease resistance gene; Frogeye leaf spot (Cercospora sojina); Marker-assisted selection; Quantitative trait locus; Soybean (Glycine max).