Genome-wide association study of drought tolerance traits in sugar beet germplasms at the seedling stage

Introduction: Sugar beets are an important crop for global sugar production. Intense drought and the increasing lack of water resources pose a great threat to beet cultivation. It is priority investigate favourable germplasms functional genes improve breeding tolerant plants. Methods: Thus, in this study, 328 were used genome-wide association study (GWAS) identify single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers candidate associated with tolerance. Results: The results showed that under stress (9% PEG-6000), there 11 significantly loci on chromosomes 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 from 108946 SNPs filtered using mixed linear model (MLM). Genome-wide analysis combined qRT-PCR identified 13 differentially expressed drought-tolerant extreme materials. Discussion: These mainly exhibited functions such as regulating metabolism, maintaining internal environmental stability participating photosystem repair. This provides valuable information exploring molecular mechanisms tolerance improvement beet.