Male Sterility Locus ms3 Is Present in a Fertility Controlling Gene Cluster in Soybean

• Published in: The Journal of heredity 2009-09, Vol.100 (5), p.565-570
• Main Authors: Cervantes-Martinez, Innan, Sandhu, Devinder, Xu, Min, Ortiz-Pérez, Evelyn, Kato, Kiyoaki K, Horner, Harry T, Palmer, Reid G
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chromosome Mapping; Chromosomes, Plant; Fsp1; gene cluster; Genes, Plant - genetics; Genetic markers; Glycine max; Glycine max - genetics; Infertility; male sterility; ms3 mutant; msMOS; Mutation; Plant biology; Plant Infertility - genetics; Plant populations; Plant reproduction
• ISSN: 0022-1503; 1465-7333
• DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esp054

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is self-pollinated. To produce large quantities of hybrid seed, insect-mediated cross-pollination is necessary. An efficient nuclear male-sterile system for hybrid seed production would benefit from molecular and/or phenotypic markers linked to male fertility/sterility loci to facilitate early identification of phenotypes. Nuclear male-sterile, female-fertile ms3 mutant is a single recessive gene and displays high outcrossed seed set with pollinators. Our objective was to map the ms3 locus. A segregating population of 150 F2 plants from Minsoy (PI 27890) × T284H, Ms3ms3 (A00-68), was screened with 231 simple sequence repeat markers. The ms3 locus mapped to molecular linkage group (MLG) D1b (Gm02) and is flanked by markers Satt157 and Satt542, with a distance of 3.7 and 12.3 cM, respectively. Female-partial sterile-1 (Fsp1) and the Midwest Oilseed male-sterile (msMOS) mutants previously were located on MLG D1b. msMOS and Fsp1 are independent genes located very close to each other. All 3 genes are located in close proximity of Satt157. We believe that this is the first report of clustering of fertility-related genes in plants. Characterization of these closely linked genes may help in understanding the evolutionary relationship among them.