Genome-wide association study of resistance to PstS2 and Warrior races of Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (stripe rust) in bread wheat landraces.

Stripe or yellow rust, caused by Puccinia striiformis Westend. f. sp. tritici is a major threat to bread wheat production worldwide. The breakdown in resistance of certain major genes and newly emerging aggressive races of stripe rusts pose serious concerns in all main wheat growing areas of the world. To identify new sources of resistance and associated QTL for effective utilization in future breeding programs an association mapping (AM) panel comprising of 600 bread wheat landraces collected from eight different countries conserved at ICARDA gene bank were evaluated for seedling and adult plant resistance against the PstS2 and Warrior races of stripe rust at the Regional Cereal Rust Research Center (RCRRC), Izmir, Turkey during 2016, 2018 and 2019. A set of 25,169 informative SNP markers covering the whole genome were used to examine the population structure, linkage disequilibrium and marker-trait associations in the AM panel. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) was carried out using a Mixed Linear Model (MLM). We identified 47 SNP markers across 19 chromosomes with significant SNP-trait associations for both seedling stage and adult plant resistance. The threshold of significance for all SNP-trait associations was determined by the false discovery rate (q) ≤ 0.05. Three genomic regions (QYr.1D_APR, QYr.3A_seedling and QYr.7D_seedling) identified in this study do not correspond to previously reported Yr genes or QTL, suggesting new genomic regions for stripe rust resistance.