Genetic dissection of southern corn leaf blight resistance in sweet corn through genome‐wide association studies and genomic selection

Southern corn leaf blight (SCLB) is caused by the fungal pathogen Bipolaris maydis (syn. Cochliobolus heterostrophus Drechsler) and is a common disease of fall crops of sweet corn. Phenotyping for SCLB resistance is performed through visual scoring, which is subjective and may limit genetic gain for this quantitative trait. As an alternative, we integrated computer vision (CV)-based phenotyping, genome-wide association studies (GWASs), and predictive breeding approaches to dissect the genetic basis of SCLB resistance. We utilized a sweet corn diversity panel with 693 genotypes, for which whole-genome resequencing produced a high-density single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) dataset. Broad-sense heritability for visual scoring ranged from 0.44 to 0.73, while CV-based phenotyping produced estimates ranging from 0.56 to 0.73 in multi-environment resistance trials conducted across 5 years and three locations. We performed GWAS using 16,755,210 SNPs and identified 41 associated SNPs. Genomic selection (GS) models on visual scoring phenotypes achieved moderate prediction accuracies under cross-validation of untested genotypes across characterized environments (0.22-0.47) and high prediction accuracies when predicting tested genotypes in uncharacterized environments (0.49-0.68). Using CV-based phenotypes for GS, we observed prediction accuracies of 0.45-0.47 under the untested genotypes in the characterized environments cross-validation scheme and 0.59-0.62 under the tested genotypes in the uncharacterized environments scheme. GS demonstrated reliability for ranking the individuals across a gradient of environments. These findings identify candidate loci and predictive breeding strategies to accelerate the development of resistant sweet corn cultivars.