Faculty of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Institute of Fermentation Sciences, Fukushima University, Fukushima 960-1296, Japan.
Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8572, Japan.
Plant Physiol. 2023 Mar 17;191(3):1561-1573. doi: 10.1093/plphys/kiad018.
Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are used to detect quantitative trait loci (QTL) using genomic and phenotypic data as inputs. While genomic data are obtained with high throughput and low cost, obtaining phenotypic data requires a large amount of effort and time. In past breeding programs, researchers and breeders have conducted a large number of phenotypic surveys and accumulated results as legacy data. In this study, we conducted a GWAS using phenotypic data of temperate japonica rice (Oryza sativa) varieties from a public database. The GWAS using the legacy data detected several known agriculturally important genes, indicating reliability of the legacy data for GWAS. By comparing the GWAS using legacy data (L-GWAS) and a GWAS using phenotypic data that we measured (M-GWAS), we detected reliable QTL for agronomically important traits. These results suggest that an L-GWAS is a strong alternative to replicate tests to confirm the reproducibility of QTL detected by an M-GWAS. In addition, because legacy data have often been accumulated for many traits, it is possible to evaluate the pleiotropic effect of the QTL identified for the specific trait that we focused on with respect to various other traits. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of using legacy data for GWASs and proposes the use of legacy data to accelerate genomic breeding.
全基因组关联研究(GWAS)用于使用基因组和表型数据作为输入来检测数量性状基因座(QTL)。虽然可以高通量、低成本地获取基因组数据,但获取表型数据需要大量的努力和时间。在过去的育种计划中,研究人员和育种家已经进行了大量的表型调查,并将结果作为遗留数据积累下来。在这项研究中,我们使用公共数据库中温带粳稻(Oryza sativa)品种的表型数据进行了 GWAS。使用遗留数据进行的 GWAS 检测到了几个已知的农业重要基因,表明遗留数据对于 GWAS 的可靠性。通过比较使用遗留数据(L-GWAS)和我们测量的表型数据(M-GWAS)进行的 GWAS,我们检测到了对农艺性状重要的可靠 QTL。这些结果表明,L-GWAS 是一种强有力的替代方法,可以重复测试以确认 M-GWAS 检测到的 QTL 的可重复性。此外,由于经常为许多性状积累了遗留数据,因此可以评估我们关注的特定性状的 QTL 对各种其他性状的多效性影响。本研究证明了使用遗留数据进行 GWAS 的有效性,并提出了使用遗留数据来加速基因组育种。