Identification of Heterosis-Associated Stable QTLs for Ear-Weight-Related Traits in an Elite Maize Hybrid Zhengdan 958 by Design III

Heterosis plays a decisive role in maize production worldwide, but its genetic basis remains unclear. In this study, we explored heterosis for ear-weight (EW)-related traits using a North Carolina Experiment III design (Design III) population derived from the elite maize hybrid Zhengdan 958. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis was conducted based on phenotypic data collected from five environments using a high-density linkage map that consisted of 905 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP). A total of 38 environmentally stable QTLs were detected, and the numbers for the Z1 and Z2 populations were 18 and 20, respectively. All environmentally stable QTLs for Z2 were characterized by the overdominance effect (OD), which indicated that overdominance was one of the most important contributors to the heterosis of EW-related traits. Consistent with the significant positive correlations between EW-related traits, 9 genomic regions with overlapped QTLs for different traits were found and were located on chromosomes 1 (1), 3 (2), 4 (3), 7 (1), 8 (1), and 9 (1). Compared to previous reports, we found that the genomic regions for heterosis were not always congruent between different hybrids, which suggested that the combination of heterotic loci in different hybrids was genotype-dependent. Collectively, these data provided further evidence that the potential utilization of QTLs for heterosis may be feasible by pyramiding if we treat the QTLs as inherited units.