Association Mapping for Shoot Traits Related to Drought Tolerance in Barley

The shoot traits related drought tolerance is an important for understanding drought tolerance mechanisms of the whole plant. The current research was curried out to identify the QTLs associated with shoot traits related to drought tolerance in a structured barley population grown under well-watered and drought stress conditions during the summer seasons of 2007-08., Marker data collected from all accessions were used to establish population structure and kinship relationships. Mixed liner model (MIL) analysis, which include population structure and kinship used to discover marker-trait associations. 56 QTLs have been identified for the shoot traits, and located on the whole barley genome, these QTLs had main and/or interaction effects on improving or reducing the traits of interest under well-watered and drought stress conditions, a total of 8, 16, 8, 8, 9, 5 and 5 QTLs were detected for wilting score (WS), no. of tillers/plant (TILS), shoot fresh weight/plant (SFW), Shoot dry weight/plant (SDW), Relative content (RWC), Proline content (PC) and Osmotic potential (OP) respectively. Six co-locations of QTLs were correlated with all studied traits and covered the whole genome of Barley population of interest.