Drought stress is one of the most important factors limiting maize production. Rab17 is an ABA-responsive gene and associated with drought tolerance. In order to identify haplotypic structure and mine allelic variants at tab17 locus, nucleotide diversity and linkage disequilibrium （LD） structure of rab17 were evaluated among a mini core set of Chinese diversified maize inbred lines. Totally, 19 SNP and 18 insertion/deletions （InDels） were identified, among which 81% were in non-coding regions and 19% in coding regions. The results showed that a high level of diversity appeared within 1 kb upstream of the rabl 7 locus, and declined quickly downstream of the gene region. Rapid decay of linkage disequilibrium of rabl 7 region with distance within 1 kb was detected. Functional markers which can be developed based on haplotype 14 are expected to have contribution to molecular breeding for drought tolerance.
Maize roots are important component for plant adaptation to soil water deficits because they are supposed to take up water and necessary solutes from the soil. In the present study, the drought-induced genes were isolated in maize roots. A suppression subtractive hybridization protocol was applied to construct a forward subtractive cDNA library from CN165 for drought-stressed maize roots and a number of drought-induced genes were isolated. Totally, 126 uniESTs （containing 82 singlets and 44 contigs） were obtained from 503 available ESTs sequences after macroarray hybridization. UniESTs were analyzed using BLASTN and BLASTX and the results showed that 92% of the uniESTs had homolgous sequences in maize nr database by BLASTN. About 89% of uniESTs appeared the homlogous amino acid sequences in rice protein database but not in maize protein database by BLASTX, implying that those genes are likely new functional genes in maize. Function analysis showed that those genes were involved in a broad spectrum of biological pathways, mainly in signaling and regulatory pathways related to stress tolerance.
LI Hui-yongHUANG Shu-huaSHI Yun-suSONG Yan-chunZHONG Zhong-baoWANG Guo-yingWANG Tian-yuLI Yu
Better understanding of genotype-by-environment interaction （GEI） is expected to provide a solid foundation for genetic improvement of crop productivity especially under drought-prone environments. To elucidate the genetic basis of the plant and ear height, 2 F2：3 populations were derived from the crosses of Qi 319 × Huangzaosi （Q/H） and Ye 478 × Huangzaosi （Y/H） with 230 and 235 families, respectively, and their parents were evaluated under 3 diverse environments in Henan, Beijing, and Xinjiang, China during the year of 2007 and 2008, and all the lines were also evaluated under water stress environment. The mapping results showed that a total of 21 and 12 QTLs were identified for plant height in the Q/H and Y/H population, respectively, and 24 and 13 QTLs for ear height, respectively. About 56 and 73% of the QTLs for 2 traits did not present significant QTL-by-environment interaction （QE1） in the normal joint analyses for Q/H and Y/H population, respectively, and about 73% of the QTLs detected did not show significant QEI according to joint analyses for stress condition in Q/H. Most of the detected major QTLs exhibited high stability across different environments. Besides, several major QTLs were detected with large and consistent effect under normal condition （Chr. 6 and 7 in Q/H; Chr. 1, 3 and 9 in Y/H）, or across 2 water regimes （Chr. 1, 8 and 10 for in Q/H）. There were several constitutive QTLs （3 for Q/H and 1 for Y/H） with no or minor QTL-by-environment for the 2 populations. Finally, we found several genomic regions （Chr. 1, 10, etc.） to be co-located across the populations, which could provide useful reference for genetic improvement of these traits in maize breeding programs. Comparative genomic analysis revealed that 3 genes/genetic segments associated with plant height in rice were orthologous to these 3 identified genomic regions carrying the major QTLs for plant and ear height on Chr. 1, 6, and 8, respectively.
