Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight based wheat gliadin protein peaks are useful molecular markers for wheat genetic study.

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) instrumentation has been used to analyze wheat seed gliadins as an alternative to other established methods, including sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE), capillary electrophoresis (CE), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), etc. The MALDI-TOF approach has shown to have many advantages such as high resolution, cost effectiveness and high throughput. MALDI-TOF-based gliadin profiles have been used for fast wheat cultivar identification. However, the genetic information represented by individual gliadin peaks has not been utilized. In this study a wheat doubled haploid population with a genetic linkage map of good coverage was used to assay individual gliadin peaks from MALDI-TOF profiles as molecular markers. Eight segregating peaks in the population were scored as polymorphic across the population. The 1 to 1 segregating ratios validated the scoring of the peaks and all peaks were mapped to the expected chromosomes or linkage groups on the available linkage map: 1 peak on chromosome 1A, 1 on 6A, 4 on 6B and 2 on 6D.