跳至主要内容

Genetic Variation for Biomass and Related Morphological Traits in Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum L.)

Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum L.) is a tall and vigorous diploid (n = 7) member of the Heliantheae tribe of the Asteraceae family. It is a long-lived perennial, can exceed 2 m in height, and has shoots that arise from short rhizomes on a broad woody crown. It differs from other species in the genus Silphium by its opposite pairs of cup forming leaves. Recently, cup plant is receiving global attention for its current or potential use for forage, bioenergy, biodiversity, conservation, and phytoremediation.

In this paper, the authors aimed to: 1) determine genetic variation and narrow-sense heritability for biomass and related morphological traits, and 2) identify half-sib families with superior biomass yield and potential for use in cultivar development in cup plant.

Field experiments were conducted over a three-year period (2011-2013) in South Dakota and Wisconsin. The cup plant population used for this genetic study was composed of progenies of 33 parent plants derived from bulk seed produced by putative random mating among several plants from each of natural populations from Minnesota and Illinois. Analyses of variance were performed to determine genetic and environmental effects using the linear models procedure in Statistix 9 and SAS V9.3. All effects were considered to be random.

The results showed that annual biomass yield at Brookings ranged from 2183 kg·ha-1 in 2012 to 8053 kg·ha-1 in 2013; whereas, yields at Arlington were similar among years. Mean individual half-sib family biomass yield ranged from 3912 to 6784 kg·ha-1 at Brookings and from 5682 to 11,269 kg·ha-1 at Arlington. Heritability estimates for five biomass-related morphological traits ranged from 0.52 to 0.72.

In summary, this study showed that variation in environmental conditions among years played the most important role in phenotypic traits in multi-family cup plant trials. However, families also had a major role in determining variation for investigated traits. Though family × year interaction effects were significant, most topyielding cup plant families showed consistent yield potential, indicating that selection for biomass based on the family means in a single environment could be successful. This conclusion was corroborated by the rank correlation analysis between years.

Article by Teshale Assefa, et al, from USA.

Full access: http://t.cn/EtkXtbI
Image by tina1960, from Flickr-cc.

评论

发表评论

此博客中的热门博文

Does Immigration Promote the Investment of the Monopolistic Firm?

In the present paper, we examine the effect of increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth on the optimal timing of investment of a firm that has a monopolistic power over the labor market. It is revealed that when the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is more than a threshold level, increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth accelerates the optimal timing of firms’ investment and enhances the economic growth, even if the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is formulated by the geometric Brownian motion, which is in sharp contrast to the standard result that an increase in the uncertainty postpones the optimal timing. With an increase in the immigrants over the past ten years, workforces in the host countries have been growing significantly to the extent that the immigrants represent 70% of the increase in the workforce in Europe, and 47% in the United States as OECD indicates. In the present paper, we attempted to investigate the effect of increased uncertainty caused by the growi...
发表评论
阅读全文

Education Policy Implementation: A Mechanism for Enhancing Primary Education Development in Zanzibar

Education is one of the fundamental rights of individuals; therefore, the government of a country needs to develop and strengthen educational policy and quality as well as to ensure that everyone has equal access to basic education. The improvement of access and quality of education in the world is becoming as an essential factor in development, whereas the basic education (primary school), is acknowledged as a foundation of the higher educational development for every country. To fulfill this goal, governments introduce several policies and procedures; however, it requires some reforms and participation from the politician, policymakers, and other stakeholders to re-examine educational policy so that it can lead to multiplication and betterment of the reforms. Educational reforms actually focus on accountability. A positive educational development and reform is very challenging and needs more effort and strategy on how to use and utilize the resources effectively as such it can achie...
发表评论
阅读全文