Genome-wide association study of plant color in Sorghum bicolor

Lihua Wang; Wenmiao Tu; Peng Jin; Yanlong Liu; Junli Du; Jiacheng Zheng; Yi-Hong Wang; Jieqin Li

doi:10.3389/fpls.2024.1320844

Genome-wide association study of plant color in Sorghum bicolor

Front Plant Sci. 2024 Apr 10:15:1320844. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1320844. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Lihua Wang^{1

2}, Wenmiao Tu^{1

2}, Peng Jin^{1

2}, Yanlong Liu^{1

2}, Junli Du^{1

2}, Jiacheng Zheng^{1

2}, Yi-Hong Wang³, Jieqin Li^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ College of Agriculture, Anhui Science and Technology University, Fengyang, Anhui, China.
² Anhui Province International Joint Research Center of Forage Bio-breeding, Chuzhou, China.
³ Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, United States.

Abstract

Introduction: Sorghum plant color is the leaf sheath/leaf color and is associated with seed color, tannin and phenol content, head blight disease incidence, and phytoalexin production.

Results: In this study, we evaluated plant color of the sorghum mini core collection by scoring leaf sheath/leaf color at maturity as tan, red, or purple across three testing environments and performed genome-wide association mapping (GWAS) with 6,094,317 SNPs markers.

Results and discussion: Eight loci, one each on chromosomes 1, 2, 4, and 6 and two on chromosomes 5 and 9, were mapped. All loci contained one to three candidate genes. In qPC5-1, Sobic.005G165632 and Sobic.005G165700 were located in the same linkage disequilibrium (LD) block. In qPC6, Sobic.006G149650 and Sobic.006G149700 were located in the different LD block. The single peak in qPC6 covered one gene, Sobic.006G149700, which was a senescence regulator. We found a loose correlation between the degree of linkage and tissue/organ expression of the underlying genes possibly related to the plant color phenotype. Allele analysis indicated that none of the linked SNPs can differentiate between red and purple accessions whereas all linked SNPs can differentiate tan from red/purple accessions. The candidate genes and SNP markers may facilitate the elucidation of plant color development as well as molecular plant breeding.

Keywords: GWAS; SNP; plant color; resequencing; sorghum.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32372134), the Anhui Provincial Natural Science Fund (2008085MC73), the Key Project of Natural Science Research of Anhui Provincial Education Department (KJ2021ZD0108), and the Distinguished talents of Anhui Provincial Education Department (gxbjZD2022045).