Identification of DNA markers related to water use efficiency and quality characteristics in durum wheat by genome wide association studies

In durum wheat breeding the use of traditional and molecular methods together has become essential for quantitative traits. In genome-wide association mapping studies (GWAS), population with high genetic diversity is genotyped once and phenotyped for more than one trait. In this study, a population consisting of 123 durum wheat has genotyped with 14.255 SilicoDArTand SNP markers was phenotyped for phenological (heading time), morphological (plant height, flag leaf area), physiological (chlorophyll content, canopy temperature, water use efficiency, drought sensitivity index, drought tolerance index), agronomic (thousand kernel weight) and quality (protein content, starch content, wet gluten content, test weight, ash content, flour colour, sedimentation volume) traits by conducting field trials for 3 years under 6 different environmental conditions. GWAS was performed using the BLINK model of the GAPIT package in R. As a result of GWAS, 65 QTLs were identified in different chromosome regions for the 14 traits examined. In addition, many genotypes were defined as candidate parents for quality-oriented breeding programs.