Marker-assisted improvement of grain protein content and grain weight in Indian bread wheat

Manish K. Vishwakarma, Balasubramaniam Arun, V. K. Mishra, P. S. Yadav, H. Kumar, Arun Kumar Joshi. (31/3/2016). Marker-assisted improvement of grain protein content and grain weight in Indian bread wheat. Euphytica, 208 (2), pp. 313-321.

Abstract

The leading Indian wheat cultivar ‘HUW234’ produces grain with relatively low protein content (GPC) and thousand grain weight (TGW). Therefore, marker-assisted backcrossing was used to improve these two important traits by introducing favorable genes/alleles from cv. ‘Glu133’, which harbors both alleles for both GPC (Gpc-B1) and TGW. Foreground selection for GPC was achieved using microsatellite markers Xucw108 linked with Gpc-B1 and Xgwm297 linked with TGW. Background selection applied to support recovery of the recurrent parent genotype was based on 86 genomically distributed microsatellites. A selected BC2F1 plant was the progenitor of 15 BC2F4 families, in which representation of the cv. HUW234 genome ranged from 89.5 to 93.0 %. The new derivatives of HUW234 were comparable in yield to the original cultivar, but with both significantly higher GPC and heavier kernels.