Running Head: Genetic determinants of seed element composition Corresponding Author:

Seedling establishment and seed nutritional quality require the sequestration of sufficient mineral nutrients. Identification of genes and alleles that modify element content in the grains of cereals, including Sorghum bicolor, is fundamental to developing breeding and selection methods aimed at increasing bioavailable mineral content and improving crop growth. We have developed a high throughput workflow for the simultaneous measurement of multiple elements in Sorghum seeds. We measured seed element levels in the genotyped Sorghum Association Panel (SAP), representing all major cultivated sorghum races from diverse geographic and climatic regions, and mapped alleles contributing to seed element variation across three environments by genomewide association. We observed significant phenotypic and genetic correlation between several elements across multiple years and diverse environments. The power of combining highprecision measurements with genome wide association was demonstrated by implementing rank transformation and a multilocus mixed model (MLMM) to map alleles controlling 20 element traits, identifying 255 loci affecting the sorghum seed ionome. Sequence similarity to genes characterized in previous studies identified likely causative genes for the accumulation of zinc (Zn) manganese (Mn), nickel (Ni), calcium (Ca) and cadmium (Cd) in sorghum seed. In addition to strong candidates for these four elements, we provide a list of candidate loci for several other elements. Our approach enabled identification of SNPs in strong LD with causative polymorphisms that can be used directly in plant breeding and improvement. peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/019083 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online May. 8, 2015;