QTL analysis of yield-related traits in sunflower under different water treatments

A set of sunflower recombinant inbred lines (RILs) was used to study agronomical traits under greenhouse and field conditions each with two water treatments and three replications. The difference among RILs was significant for all the traits studied in all conditions; and water treatment x RILs interaction was also observed for most of the traits in both field and greenhouse conditions. Because of the low rate of drought stress, this part of field data are not informative. Several quantitative trait loci (QTLs) were identified for yield-related traits with the percentage of phenotypic variance explained by QTLs (R-2) ranging from 4% to 40%. Several QTLs for grain yield per plant (GYP) under four water treatments were identified on different linkage groups, among which two were specific to a single treatment (GYPN.4.1, GYPI.7.1). Three QTLs for GYP were overlapped with several QTLs for drought-adaptative traits detected in our previous study (Poormohammad Kiani et al. 2007b). The whole results do highlight interesting genomic regions for marker-based breeding programmes for drought tolerance in sunflower.