Abstract
Drought stress is a serious agronomic problem resulting in significant yield losses globally. Breeding cultivars with drought tolerance is an important strategy that can be used to address this problem. Drought tolerance, however, is a complex multigenic trait, making advancements with conventional breeding approaches very challenging. This emphasizes the importance of dissecting the genetics of this trait and the identification and cloning of genes responsible for drought tolerance. With the rapid development of sequencing technologies and analytic methodologies, genome-wide association study (GWAS) has become an important tool for detecting natural variations underlying complex traits in crops. Identified loci can serve as targets for genomic selection or precise editing that enables the molecular design of new cultivars. This chapter describes the pipeline of statistical methods used in GWAS analysis, and covers field design, quality control, population structure control, association tests, and visualization of data. GWAS methodology used to dissect the genetic basis of drought tolerance is presented, and perspectives for optimizing the design and analysis of GWAS are discussed. The provided information serves as a valuable resource for researchers interested in GWAS technology.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr Hongwei Wang for the helpful discussion. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31625022 and 31971952), Bei**g Outstanding Young Scientist Program (BJJWZYJH01201910019026), and the National Key Research and Development Plan of China (2016YFD0100605).
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Liu, S., Qin, F. (2022). Genome-Wide Association Analyses to Identify SNPs Related to Drought Tolerance. In: Yoshida, T. (eds) Abscisic Acid. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2462. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2156-1_16
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