Mining Novel Kernel Size-Related Genes By Pqtl Mapping And Multi-Omics Integrative Analysis In Developing Maize Kernels

As a sink organ for starch, protein, oil, and essential nutrients, the maize (Zea mays) kernel is not only the main target for yield and quality improvement but also a model system for genetic and molecular biology studies. We identified many candidate genes for maize kernel quality and size quantitative trait loci (QTLs) at the genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, and phenomic levels by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and joint-linkage mapping (Fu et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2017a; Liu et al., 2017b; Wen et al., 2014; Yang et al., 2014) using a widely adopted Chinese association panel (Yang et al. 2011) and five recombinant inbred line (RIL) populations (Liu et al., 2017b).