Saturation of barley chromosomes with transposons to target malting quality traits

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Barley is a key ingredient in malting and brewing. Malt, produced from germinating barley is used for making alcoholic beverages. Brewing companies are the main consumers for barley malt. Malting quality is composed of a number of traits including percentage of malt extract, total grain protein, wort protein, ß-glucan and kernel plumpness, a-amylase activity, kernel weight and diastatic power. Malting quality is an economically important phenotype but genetically complex. Genetic improvement of malting quality is impaired by its quantitative nature and low heritability. A series of efforts have been undertaken to genetically dissect this trait and to localize individual quantitative trait loci (QTL) on the genetic map of barley. One major QTL complex, QTL2 mapped on the short arm of chromosome 4H, affects several malting quality parameters. We are saturating malting-quality QTL regions with transposons, commonly known as "jumping genes" to facilitate identification and characterization of genes associated with malting in the QTL2. This effort of saturation mutagenesis with transposons will lead to a better understanding of malting quality traits and candidate genes that display quantitative variation. Identification of the candidate genes harboured in this QTL will allow development of functional markers for breeding of malting barley.