Towards molecular breeding of barley: Construction of a molecular genetic map

Abstract

Genetic map construction is an important step towards identifying genes that are responsible for the expression of traits. To achieve this goal a dihaploid mapping population was constructed between the barley parents Tallon and Kaputar. Parents were first screened with amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) and simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. A total of 211 AFLP markers and 33 SSR markers were identified as polymorphic between the parents. Then all of the polymorphic AFLP markers and 24 of the SSR markers were assayed for the whole population. Linkage analysis of the markers revealed seven large and thirteen smaller linkage groups. The seven large linkage groups are assigned to individual barley chromosomes with reference to the published map locations of the SSR markers. The total map covered 1300 cM, which is about the expected size of the barley genome