Diagnostic markers for foliar fungal disease resistance and high oleic acid in groundnut

Abstract Resistance two foliar fungal diseases (rust and late leaf spot) are farmers preferred traits because of their devastating nature, while high oleic acid content has immerged as one of the important industry and consumer preferred traits due to increased shelf life and health benefits. With an objective to increase the frequency of the favorable alleles for these three important traits among parental lines and breeding populations, we have identified candidate resistance genes for two diseases and developed diagnostic markers for all three traits followed by validating and deploying them in forward breeding or marker-assisted early generation selection (MEGS). A total of 49 KASPs were developed using sequencing-based trait mapping approaches with diploid as well as tetraploid groundnut reference genomes. Of the 49 KASPs markers, 41 KASPs were validated successfully on a validation panel of contrasting germplasm and breeding lines. Of the 41 validated KASPs, 39 KASPs are for rust and LLS, while two KASPs are for high oleic acid developed from A- and B- sub-genomes. The KASP markers were developed from genomic regions of important disease resistance genes such as NBS-LRR, purple acid phosphatase, pentatricopeptide repeat-containing protein, Serine/threonine-protein phosphatase. So far, these KASP markers have been extensively used by various groundnut breeding programs across the world, offering low-cost and high-throughput genotyping. Overall, employing these KASP markers will likely facilitate the effective selection favorable alleles from parental lines and breeding populations with higher resistance to foliar fungal diseases and increased levels of high oleic acid content, consequently resulting in improved groundnut crop production and quality.