QTL of three agronomically important traits and their interactions with environment in a European x Chinese rapeseed population.

A rapeseed population consisted of 282 doubled haploid (DH) lines derived from a cross between a European vality "Sallux" and a Chinese inbred line "Gaoyou" was planted in 4 locations, 2 in Xi'an and Hangzhou, China, and 2 in Goettingen, Germany. Field experiments were carried out to obtain agronomically phenotypic data from above four environments. A linkage map including 125 SSR-markers was constructed and QTL analyses was performed using mixed model approach to detect QTLs showing additive (a), epistasis (aa) as well as their interactions with environments (QE) for three important agronomic traits: plant height, flowering time and maturity. The results demonstrated that each trait was controlled by several QTLs with additive effect and a number of QTLs with epistatic and QE interaction effects. Plant height was controlled by many QTLs (12 loci with a or combined ae, 5 loci with ae). Additive effects were predominant,totally explained 75% of the phenotypic variation and often combined with digenic epistasis. Of 12 main QTLs, 9 showed Gaoyou alleles decreasing plant height. Most of QTLs with QE effects showed ecologically favourable alleles in diverse regions. Five of 7 ae loci showed Gaoyou alleles in Hangzhou and all the ae loci but one had Sollux alleles in two locations of Germany increasing plant height. The digenic epistatic main effect accounted for one third of total additive main effects. In this study,we discovered 7 and 8 loci having significant additive main effects upon flowering time and maturity, respectively. Of them, early flowering and maturity alleles were respectively 6 and 5 derived from Chinese parent Gaoyou. All these QTLs together accounted for around 60% of the phenotypic variation for each trait. Significant ae interactions were detected for flowering time and maturity and parental alleles showed almost evenly dispersal at all environments. Three of 8 main QTLs for maturity were located at similar or identical positions as QTLs for flowering time, which confirmed the close correlation between these two traits. Two QTLs for plant height on linkage groups N14-1 and 19 were located at similar positions as QTL for flowering time and as already known QTLs for oil content. Selection for reduced plant height and early flowering might reduce oil content. Digenic epistatic QTLs both for flowering time and maturity were detected but much less important than QTLs with additive effects.