Genetic Analyses Of Nutritional Quality Traits And Breeding In Maize

Maize is an important crop with three functions as foods, animal feeds and economic uses in China. Improving maize's nutritional quality plays a key role in developing animal husbandry, food processing, as well as agricultural production of high quality and efficiency. But for a long time, because of the great pressure of rapid growing population and food shortage in China, maize has long been regarded as the coarse food grain, and the maize breeding objective has been focused on the increase of grain yield, the study on quality improvement of maize, however, has been lagged due to the poor investment. With the change from quantity-centered to quality-centered in agriculture technology, especially with the rapid development of husbandry and processing industry, the market demands for quality maize are continuously increasing. Accordingly, the development of quality maize hybrid with high yield has become important task in today's maize breeding. By combining quantitative genetic method with molecular ones, using common maize as resources, the studies on the genetics of the major nutritional quality traits controlled by polygenes, breeding methods and the application have been carried out. The major results are list as follow:The studies on 14 maize inbred lines and its 49 F₁ combinations derived from 7 ×7 incomplete diallel crossing demonstrate that: (1) The volume weight, isoleucine, arginine and glycine are mainly influenced by the additive genetic effect; and protein, lysine, methionine and aspartate by both additive and non-additive effect; while starch, oil and other 10 amino acids by nonadditive effect. (2) The contents of protein,...