GENETICS OF YIELD VARIATION AND GENOTYPE BY ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS IN THE COOPERATIVE DRY BEAN NURSERIES

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) yields have improved in multiple long-term breeding efforts across the world. An important long-term trial that supports these breeding efforts is the Cooperative Dry Bean Nursery (CDBN), an ongoing 60+ year collaboration across the United States and Canada. However, large genotype-by-environment interactions (GxE) persist in common bean (Figure 1). Though genomics assisted breeding tools and analyses to study GxE are rapidly improving (Heffner et al., 2009; Perez & de los Campos 2014), accurate phenotyping in relevant field conditions remains a major limitation of these analyses. Major phenotyping efforts such as the CDBN, when combined with genomic data, offer unparalleled opportunities to determine how major genetic factors affect genotype by environment interactions. To characterize the genetics of phenotypic variation in common bean, phenotypes and fitness in a wide range of environments must be connected to the alleles that influence them. In collaboration with current common bean sequencing efforts, we are sequencing 320 varieties and breeding lines from the CDBN to establish a genome-wide association (GWA) mapping population. We will use this panel to determine the genomic regions associated with phenology, yield, and other traits phenotyped by the CDBN. We will also use weather data associated with each location and year to determine the genetics of, and the abiotic factors leading to, GxE interactions between these phenotypes and climate