Association mapping of quantitative traits in molecular cereal breeding (Review Article)

The field of association mapping studies has recently received major attention for genetic studies of quantitative traits in many important plants. Access to next generation sequencing technologies, high phenotypic data and a variety of sophisticated statistical tools have enabled association mapping studies in plants to be successful in identifying gene loci controlling quantitative traits. Due to the importance of association mapping method in mapping studies of the quantitative traits, the present paper was prepared to explain the association mapping method and its use in plant breeding especially cereals. This paper, also provides some information about statistical softaware packages used in association mapping and then the opportunities and challenges of association mapping and post-genome wide association studies at the whole genome level will be discussed. Finally, linkage disequilibrium value and association mapping analysis will be evaluated based on general linear model (GLM) and mixed linear method (MLM) using a simple example.