Arabidopsis seed content QTL mapping using high-throughput phenotyping: the assets of Near Infrared Spectroscopy

• Main Authors: Sophie Jasinski, Alain Lécureuil, Monique Durandet, Patrick Bernard-Moulin, Philippe Guerche
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-11-01
• Series: Frontiers in Plant Science
• Subjects: Quantitative Trait Loci; plant; Arabidopsis thaliana; natural variation; Near Infrared Spectroscopy; seed protein content
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpls.2016.01682/full

Seed storage compounds are of crucial importance for human diet, feed and industrial uses. In oleo-proteaginous species like rapeseed, seed oil and protein are the qualitative determinants that conferred economic value to the harvested seed. To date, although the biosynthesis pathways of oil and storage protein are rather well known, the factors that determine how these types of reserves are partitioned in seeds have to be identified. With the aim of implementing a quantitative genetics approach, requiring phenotyping of hundreds of plants, our first objective was to establish near-infrared reflectance spectroscopic (NIRS) predictive equations in order to estimate oil, protein, carbon and nitrogen content in Arabidopsis seed with high-throughput level. Our results demonstrated that NIRS is a powerful non-destructive, high-throughput method to assess the content of these four major components studied in Arabidopsis seed. With this tool in hand, we analysed Arabidopsis natural variation for these four components and illustrated that they all displayed a wide range of variation. Finally, NIRS was used in order to map QTL for these four traits using seeds from the Arabidopsis thaliana Ct-1 x Col-0 recombinant inbred line population. Some QTL co-localised with QTL previously identified, but others mapped to chromosomal regions never identified so far for such traits. This paper illustrates the usefulness of NIRS predictive equations to perform accurate high-throughput phenotyping of Arabidopsis seed content, opening new perspectives in gene identification following QTL mapping and Genome Wide Association Studies.