Abstract
The environment can influence heterosis, the phenomena in which the offspring of two inbred parents exhibits phenotypic performance beyond the inbred parents for specific traits. In this study we measured 25 traits in a set of 47 maize hybrids and their inbred parents grown in 16 different environments with varying levels of average productivity. By quantifying 25 vegetative and reproductive traits across the life cycle we were able to analyze interactions between the environment and multiple distinct instances of heterosis. The magnitude and rank among hybrids for better-parent heterosis (BPH) varied for the different traits and environments. Across the traits, a higher within plot variance was observed for inbred lines compared to hybrids. However, for most traits, variance across environments was not significantly different for inbred lines compared to hybrids. Further, for many traits the correlations of BPH to hybrid performance and BPH to better parent performance were of comparable magnitude. These results indicate that inbred lines and hybrids show similar trends in environmental response and both are contributing to observed genotype-by-environment interactions for heterosis. This study highlights the degree of heterosis is not an inherent trait of a specific hybrid, but varies depending on the trait measured and the environment where that trait is measured. Studies that attempt to correlate molecular processes with heterosis are hindered by the fact that heterosis is not a consistent attribute of a specific hybrid.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0191321 |
| Journal | PloS one |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported in part by the Minnesota Corn Research and Promotion Council (Project Number 4108-16SP) to CNH, the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station (Project 13-014) to CNH, the Iowa Corn Growers to PSS, and Iowa State University’s Plant Sciences Institute to PSS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Peter Hermanson, Brad Keiter and James Satterlee for technical assistance.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.