Can natural variation in grain P concentrations be exploited in rice breeding to lower fertilizer requirements?

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179484
• Publication Date: 2017-06-26T13:40:37Z
• Authors: Fanmiao Wang; James Douglas Mor...; Terry Rose; Tobias Kretzschmar; Matthias Wissuwa
• Keywords: Plant Breeding

Agricultural usage of phosphorus (P) is largely driven by the amount P removed from fields in harvested plant matter as offtake needs to be balanced fertilizer application. Reducing concentration grains a way decrease and reduce requirements or soil mining where insufficient applied. Our objective was assesses genotypic variation for grain present within rice gene pool resolve what extent it affected environment (P supply) associated with genetic factors. About 2-fold concentrations were detected two diversity panels, however, environmental effects stronger than genotype effects. Genome wide association studies identified several putative loci concentrations. In most cases this caused minor haplotype associations high while reduced on chromosomes 1, 6, 8, 11 12. Only latter type locus interest breeding promising at 20.7 Mb chromosome rare that absent all modern varieties studied 9.3%. This other not consistently across environments confirming small compared environment. We conclude sufficiently large consistent utility breeding. Instead efforts may have rely medium effect mutants already attempt achieve more pronounced reduction through introgression these into single background.