Integrating Genome-Wide Association Study with Transcriptomic Analysis to Predict Candidate Genes Controlling Storage Root Flesh Color in Sweet Potato

Sweet potato is a hexaploid heterozygote with complex genetic background, self-pollination infertility, and cross incompatibility, which makes linkage analysis quite difficult. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide new strategy for gene mapping cloning in sweet potato. Storage root flesh color (SRFC) an important sensory evaluation, correlates storage composition, such as starch, anthocyanin, carotenoid. We performed GWAS using SRFC data of 300 accessions 567,828 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Furthermore, we analyzed transcriptome different varieties, conducted real-time quantitative PCR (qRT-PCR) to measure the expression level candidate purple non-purple fleshed genotypes. The results showed that five unique SNPs were significantly (−log10P > 7) associated SRFC. Based on these trait-associated SNPs, four genes, g55964 (IbF3′H), g17506 (IbBAG2-like), g25206 (IbUGT-73D1-like), g58377 (IbVQ25-isoform X2) identified. Expression profiles derived from qRT-PCR analyses purple-fleshed was (p < 0.01) higher than By combining GWAS, transcriptomic qRT-PCR, inferred key related formation Our lay foundation accelerating improvement anthocyanin through marker-assisted selection.