Dissecting the components of yield in winter oats: genetic diversity of 16 oat lines

Avena sativa L. (A. sativa) is the third most important cereal crop in the UK but comparatively little research has been conducted on understanding yield and its components in this species. In this project we are using a range of tall and dwarf cultivars to investigate the biochemical, physiological and genetic components of traits associated with yield potential along with segregating individuals of existing mapping populations between parents of contrasting height. We report here the results of a study to the quantify the genetic diversity between sixteen commercially important winter oat cultivars from the IGER oat breeding programme ranging from those released in the 1960’s to the present day. This work is in conjunction with an ongoing concurrent detailed physiological study using these cultivars with the overall aim to exploit germplasm to understand and improve the yield capacity of oats.

Compared to other cereals such as barley, wheat and rice, few oat microsatellites have been published and relatively few have been assigned a genetic map location. In this study, fifty-four microsatellite markers were used including those developed for oats as well as from wheat, barley and ryegrass. They were run on either polyacrylamide gels or an ABI 3137 capillary sequencer. Results were analysed with NTSYSpc version 2.11a. Relationships obtained in the resulting dendrogram were consistent with the pedigree information available for these lines with two main groupings obtained. Many of the markers used detected more than one locus in the genome due to the hexaploid nature of oats.