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Genome-wide association study of flowering time and grain yield traits in a worldwide collection of rice germplasm

Nature Genetics volume 44, pages 32–39 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

A high-density haplotype map recently enabled a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in a population of indica subspecies of Chinese rice landraces. Here we extend this methodology to a larger and more diverse sample of 950 worldwide rice varieties, including the Oryza sativa indica and Oryza sativa japonica subspecies, to perform an additional GWAS. We identified a total of 32 new loci associated with flowering time and with ten grain-related traits, indicating that the larger sample increased the power to detect trait-associated variants using GWAS. To characterize various alleles and complex genetic variation, we developed an analytical framework for haplotype-based de novo assembly of the low-coverage sequencing data in rice. We identified candidate genes for 18 associated loci through detailed annotation. This study shows that the integrated approach of sequence-based GWAS and functional genome annotation has the potential to match complex traits to their causal polymorphisms in rice.

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Figure 1: Genetic structure and population differentiation in 950 rice accessions.
Figure 2: Causal variant detection in six genes previously identified by GWAS in the indica population.
Figure 3: Illustration of haplotype-based local assembly.
Figure 4: Genome-wide association study of heading date in the indica population, the japonica population and the full population using the compressed MLM.
Figure 5: Regions of the genome showing association signals and the expression profiles of candidate genes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the China National Rice Research Institute for providing the rice germplasm samples. We thank S. Griffiths and G. Moore for critical reading of the manuscript. We thank Z. Zhang and E.S. Buckler for helping us use the compressed MLM and Z. Ning for assistance with sequence alignment. This work was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-N-094), the Ministry of Agriculture of China (2011ZX08001-004 and 2011ZX08009-002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30821004) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2011CB100205) to B.H.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Xuehui Huang, Yan Zhao and Xinghua Wei: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Gene Research, National Center for Plant Gene Research (Shanghai), Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Xuehui Huang, Yan Zhao, Canyang Li, Ahong Wang, Qiang Zhao, Wenjun Li, Yunli Guo, Liuwei Deng, Chuanrang Zhu, Danlin Fan, Yiqi Lu, Qijun Weng, Kunyan Liu, Taoying Zhou, Yufeng Jing, Lizhen Si, Guojun Dong, Tao Huang, Tingting Lu, Qi Feng & Bin Han

  2. Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Genome Sciences and Information, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xuehui Huang, Yan Zhao & Bin Han

  3. State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology, China National Rice Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou, China

    Xinghua Wei, Guojun Dong & Qian Qian

  4. National Center for Plant Gene Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jiayang Li

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  1. Xuehui Huang
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Contributions

B.H. conceived of the project and its components. J.L. and B.H. contributed to the original concept of the project. W.L., Y.G., L.D., D.F., Y.L., Q.W. and Q.F. performed the genome sequencing. X.H., Q.Z., Y.Z., C.Z., K.L., L.S., T.H. and T.L. performed the genome data analyses. Y.Z., C.Z., Q.Z. and X.H. improved the imputation program for the data analyses. X.H., Q.Z. and Y.Z. developed an analytical framework for de novo assembly of the low-coverage sequencing data. X.W., C.L., A.W., T.Z., Y.J., G.D. and Q.Q. collected samples and performed the phenotyping. Y.Z. and X.H. performed the GWAS and statistical analyses. X.H. and B.H. analyzed all of the data together and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bin Han.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Note, Supplementary Tables 4, 6, 7 and 9–12 and Supplementary Figures 1–31. (PDF 14125 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

The list of 950 accessions sampled in the collection. (XLS 181 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

The levels of sequence diversity (π) in each group across the rice genome. (XLS 477 kb)

Supplementary Table 3

The levels of pariwise population differentiation (Fst) across the rice genome. (XLS 382 kb)

Supplementary Table 5

The list of SNP sites with population-special alleles. (XLS 64 kb)

Supplementary Table 8

The detailed list of all the large-effect variations in rice genome. (XLS 788 kb)

Supplementary Table 13

The detailed list of the microarrays used in the study and their related descriptions. (XLS 158 kb)

Supplementary Table 14

The genotype dataset of indica accessions on the causal polymorphic sites of Hd3a. (XLS 32 kb)

Supplementary Table 15

The genotype dataset of indica accessions on the causal polymorphic sites of OsFBX310. (XLS 53 kb)

Supplementary Table 16

The genotype dataset of japonica accessions on the causal polymorphic sites of OsRAL6. (XLS 26 kb)

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Huang, X., Zhao, Y., Wei, X. et al. Genome-wide association study of flowering time and grain yield traits in a worldwide collection of rice germplasm. Nat Genet 44, 32–39 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.1018

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