Abstract

Mathias M, Reyes María Elena, Bustamante-Gutierrez F, Flores-Vera J, Maureira-Buttler I, Salvo-Garrido H (2014) Genetic structure of a Chilean oat core collection based on GBS SNPs. In: American Oat Workers, American Oat Workers Conference, Ottawa, Canada. July 13-16, 2014. p. 28. Oat is the mayor agricultural export product for “La Araucanía” region, Chile. The continuous increase of oat cropping area has transformed Chile in the fourth oat food exporting country. Oat, as most crops, must be better adapted to new environmental conditions, such as climate changes and global warming, in order to increase, or at least maintain grain yields, pest resistance, industrial quality, and healthy food quality traits. To overcome these challenges, oat breeding at INIA has generated several genetic and genomic strategies to aid the introduction of novel favorable genetic variation, pre-breeding, and selection of better-adapted oat genotypes. In this study, we show the use of a set of SNP markers, generated by Genotyping by Sequencing-GBS, to understand genetic diversity within our oat core collection. A set of 190 diverse oat accessions were included in the analyses, and 370, out of 20,475 SNPs, were used for a genetic population structure analysis. The most likely number of subpopulations was eight, with allele frequency divergence among them ranging from 0.23 to 0.43. Fst values for each subpopulation were high (0.65-0.98), as expected in self-pollinated species. Currently, the whole set of SNPs are being used for association studies using a large set of phenotypic data, collected in multi environment evaluations, in order to discover QTLs associated to agronomic, industrial and food quality related traits. Acknowledgments: Quaker Oats, Agriaquaculture Nutritional Genomic Center (CGNA), “Alimentos El Globo S.A.” Company, “Corporación de Fomento de la Producción” – CORFO (INNOVA 12IDL2-13628).