ABSTRACT The use of founder parents in parental selection can significantly improve breeding efficiency and is crucial for crop variety renewal and replacement. To understand the genetic characteristics of plant height in the high‐quality founder parent Linfen 5064, DH populations were constructed using Linfen 5064 as the female parent and Nongda 3338 and Jinmai 47 as the male parents to identify the loci correlated with plant height in Linfen 5064 and analyze the genetic effects of these loci. Twenty stable QTLs associated with plant height were detected in the two DH populations, explaining 1.69%–45.12% of the phenotypic variation. QPH LJ.4B.1 , QPH LJ.5A.2 , QPH LJ.6A.1 , QPH LN.4B.1 , and QPH LN.6A.1 were detected in more than seven environments. The lines carrying QPH‐LJ.4B.1 LF5064 , QPH‐LJ.5A.2 LF5064 , and QPH‐LN.4B.1 LF5064 showed significant plant height reduction effects, at 13.13%, 8.72%, and 14.80%, respectively, with relatively small negative effects on thousand‐grain weight and grain number per spike and no delay in heading date. An additive effect analysis revealed that the lines carrying both QPH‐LJ.4B.1 LF5064 and QPH‐LJ.5A .2 LF5064 could significantly reduce the plant height by 25.12% and significantly increase the number of grains per spike by 17.15%. In addition, the stable QTLs QPH‐2D.1 and QPH‐5A , which control the plant height effect from Linfen 5064, were simultaneously detected in the two DH populations, and the heights of the lines containing these two allelic variations were significantly reduced. Further analysis revealed that the stable and highly effective QPH‐LN.4B.1 locus had an average transmission rate of 100% to the first generation of derivatives and rates of 68% and 67% to the second and third generations of derivatives, respectively. These findings indicate that Linfen 5064, as the founder parent, is superior in terms of reducing plant height.
Zhou et al. (Sun,) studied this question.