The use of molecular markers for characterisation of spring barley for breeding to Fusarium head blight resistance

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a barley disease, which occurs every year in various areas of barley cultivation all over the world and the increasing incidence has been confirmed in the Czech Republic also during the last years. We aimed to emply AFLP (Amplified fragment length polymorphism) and SSR (Single sequence repeats) markers to describe diversity among breeding lines with a sufficient level of resistance towards FHB and to find marker(s) as - sociated with the analysed traits. The number of eight accessions including five expected resistance donors and three sensitive lines were tested in the field and laboratory. The field values and the amount of deoxynivalenol were posi - tively correlated (r = 0.92). The laboratory test and content DON manifested also a high correlation (r = 0.73). Several DH lines developed from androgenetic barley progenies of the F1 hybrids between the susceptible line PI 383933 and resistant line PEC 210 or the susceptible line PI 383933 and resistant cultivar Chevron were found resistant towards Fusarium infection in both the field and laboratory tests. Low infestation was found at line DH 37 from combination Chevron × PI 383933 and lines DH48, DH49, DH50 and DH55 from the combination PEC 210 × PI 383933. Cluster analyses based on 68 AFLP and 18 SSR markers demonstrate a genetic relationship among parental genotypes and DH lines. Some DH lines combined a sufficient degree of resistance against FHB and extract content (basic param- eters malting quality). Statistically significant differences in malt-extract values were observed between groups of the DH lines possessing and not possessing the AFLP marker CAA/AGC 341bp. The markers will be further evaluated and optionally used for MAS.