Marker-assisted improvement of grain protein content and grain weight in Indian bread wheat

Abstract

The leading Indian wheat cultivar ‘HUW234’ produces grain with relatively low protein content (GPC) and thousand grain weight (TGW). Therefore, marker-assisted backcrossing was used to improve these two important traits by introducing favorable genes/alleles from cv. ‘Glu133’, which harbors both alleles for both GPC (Gpc-B1) and TGW. Foreground selection for GPC was achieved using microsatellite markers Xucw108 linked with Gpc-B1 and Xgwm297 linked with TGW. Background selection applied to support recovery of the recurrent parent genotype was based on 86 genomically distributed microsatellites. A selected BC2F1 plant was the progenitor of 15 BC2F4 families, in which representation of the cv. HUW234 genome ranged from 89.5 to 93.0 %. The new derivatives of HUW234 were comparable in yield to the original cultivar, but with both significantly higher GPC and heavier kernels.