Incomplete dominance of deleterious alleles contributes substantially to trait variation and heterosis in maize.

ABSTRACT: Deleterious alleles have long been proposed to play an important role in patterning phenotypic variation and are central to commonly held ideas explaining the hybrid vigor observed in the offspring of a cross between two inbred parents. We test these ideas using evolutionary measures of sequence conservation to ask whether incorporating information about putatively deleterious alleles can inform genomic selection (GS) models and improve phenotypic prediction. We measured a number of agronomic traits in both the inbred parents and hybrids of an elite maize partial diallel population and re-sequenced the parents of the population. Inbred elite maize lines vary for more than 350,000 putatively deleterious sites, but show a lower burden of such sites than a comparable set of traditional landra

SUBMITTER: Yang J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5633198 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature