Hitchhiking Effect Mapping： A New Approach for Discovering Agronomic Important Genes

Besides the natural selection, the crops cultivated today have experienced two episodes of strong artificial selection, domestic and modern breeding. Domestication led to giant genetic structure differentiation between cultivars and their wild species, while modern breeding made further genetic structure differentiation between the modern varieties and the landraces. In a population, diversity of the loci under strong selection is significantly lower than that of other loci. At the same time, diversity in the genomic regions flanking these selected loci also declines in the process of selection. This phenomenon is called hitchhiking effects or selection sweep in genetics. Genomic regions with selection sweep （haplotype block） could be detected after draft genome scanning （genome typing） with molecular markers in a number of released varieties or natural populations. Marker/trait association analysis in these regions would detect the loci （or QTLs） even the favored alleles （genes） in breeding or natural adaptation. Fine scanning of these genomic regions would help to determine the sizes of haplotype blocks and to discover the key genes, thereby providing very valuable information for isolation of the key genes and molecular design of new varieties. Establishment of high density genetic linkage maps in the major crops and availability of high throughput genotyping platform make it possible to discover agronomic important genes through marker/trait association analysis. On the basis of available publications, we give a brief introduction of the hitchhiking effect mapping approach in this paper using plant height, 1 000-grain weight, and phosphorus-deficiency tolerance as examples in wheat.

Hitchhiking Effect Mapping: A New Approach for Discovering Agronomic Important Genes

Besides the natural selection, the crops cultivated today have experienced two episodes of strong artificial selection, domestic and modern breeding. Domestication led to giant genetic structure differentiation between cultivars and their wild species, while modern breeding made further genetic structure differentiation between the modern varieties and the landraces. In a population, diversity of the loci under strong selection is significantly lower than that of other loci. At the same time, diversity in the genomic regions flanking these selected loci also declines in the process of selection. This phenomenon is called hitchhiking effects or selection sweep in genetics. Genomic regions with selection sweep (haplotype block) could be detected after draft genome scanning (genome typing) with molecular markers in a number of released varieties or natural populations. Marker/trait association analysis in these regions would detect the loci (or QTLs) even the favored alleles (genes) in breeding or natural adaptation. Fine scanning of these genomic regions would help to determine the sizes of haplotype blocks and to discover the key genes, thereby providing very valuable information for isolation of the key genes and molecular design of new varieties. Establishment of high density genetic linkage maps in the major crops and availability of high throughput genotyping platform make it possible to discover agronomic important genes through marker/trait association analysis. On the basis of available publications, we give a brief introduction of the hitchhiking effect mapping approach in this paper using plant height, 1000-grain weight, and phosphorus-deficiency tolerance as examples in wheat.