Linum Genetic Markers, Maps, and QTL Discovery

Linum usitatissimum (flax) is an ancient crop that has now a rapidly expanding set of genomic resources. The development of molecular markers from restriction fragment length polymorphisms to simple sequence repeats and single nucleotide polymorphisms has followed the evolution of these technologies and then expanded through the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies. The combination of markers, next-generation sequencing, and optical mapping techniques has supported the development of genetic maps with an increasing density of markers resulting in the assembly of chromosome-based pseudomolecules. These marker resources have been used to identify quantitative trait loci for numerous agronomically important traits within the cultivated flax and its wild progenitor core collections.