Genotype by Environment Interaction of Quantitative Traits: A Case Study in Barley

Genotype by environment interaction is a phenomenon that a better genotype in one environment may perform poorly in another environment. When the genotype refers to a quantitative trait locus (QTL), this phenomenon is called QTL by environment interaction, denoted by Q×E. Using a recently developed new Bayesian method and genome-wide marker information, we estimated and tested QTL main effects and Q×E interactions for a well-known barley dataset produced by the North American Barley Genome Mapping Project. This dataset contained seven quantitative traits collected from 145 doubled-haploid (DH) lines evaluated in multiple environments, which derived from a cross between two Canadian two-row barley lines, Harrington and TR306. Numerous main effects and Q×E interaction effects have been detected for all seven quantitative traits. However, main effects seem to be more important than the Q×E interaction effects for all seven traits examined. The number of main effects detected varied from 26 for the maturity trait to 75 for the heading trait, with an average of 61.86. The heading trait has the most detected effects, with a total of 98 (75 main, 29 Q×E). Among the 98 effects, 6 loci had both the main and Q×E effects. Among the total number of detected loci, on average, 78.5% of the loci show the main effects whereas 34.9% of the loci show Q×E interactions. Overall, we detected many loci with either the main or the Q×E effects, and the main effects appear to be more important than the Q×E interaction effects for all the seven traits. This means that most detected loci have a constant effect across environments. Another discovery from this analysis is that Q×E interaction occurs independently, regardless whether the locus has main effects.