W131 Association mapping in cacao

Date: Sunday, January 15, 2012
Time: 5:30 PM
Room: Royal Palm Salons 3-4
Osman Ariel Gutierrez , USDA-ARS, Miami, FL
Chifumi Nagai , Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, Kunia, HI
Rebecca Heinig , Hawaii Agriculture Center, Kunia, HI
Edward Boza , USDA-ARS, Miami, FL
Cecile Tondo , USDA-ARS, Miami, FL
Juan Carlos Motamayor , MARS Inc., Miami, FL
Raymond J. Schnell , MARS Inc., Miami, FL
Association mapping is becoming important in perennial crops because it is a better alternative to the classical QTL's mapping approaches.  The development of large breeding populations (F2, backcrosses and recombinant inbred populations) is a requirement of QTL's discovery; however, this process requires years in cacao because of its long and slow growing reproductive cycle.  In a previous study, a population of cacao in Hawaii was characterized using SSR markers and it was determined that it belonged to the Trinitario and Upper Amazon Forastero by Trinitario hybrid groups.  One hundred productive and fifty-one unproductive plants from this population were selected and fingerprinted using 80 SSR markers equally distributed across the cacao linkage groups.  Yield data for pod and bean characters from the selected and unselected plants were also collected from 2007 until 2009.  The objective of this study were to investigate the possible association between SSR markers and yield traits in productive as well as unproductive selected plants.  Population structure and association mapping studies were conducted using the Structure and GenStat software.  Preliminary results indicated that some association between SSR markers and yield traits may be present in this population.