Fine mapping for domestication traits using recombinant chromosome nearly isogenic lines

Abstract

In past work the Doebley Lab used maize-teosinte hybrid recombinant inbred lines (RILs) to find various quantitative trait loci (QTL) for ear size in order to study the process of domestication. Of particular interest was a significant large effect QTL on chromosome 5 for ear diameter (Shannon, 2013). A different set of maize-teosinte lines than was used initially narrowed down that same QTL to a 2.654 Mbp region (Lemmon and Doebley, 2014). Recombinant chromosome nearly isogenic lines (RC-NILs) were created that were meant to segregate only for the region of interest. Both phenotypic and genotypic data was collected for the RC-NILs and results did not show a clear region of segregation between kernels per rank for maize and teosinte. Future work will utilize a subset of the RC-NILs that did not segregate on chromosome 7 and hopefully determine the gene responsible for the large effect QTL on chromosome 5.