Evidence of Multiple Disease Resistance (MDR) and implication of meta-analysis in marker assisted selection

Meta-analysis was performed for three major foliar diseases with the aim to find out the total number of QTL responsible for these diseases and depict some real QTL for molecular breeding and marker assisted selection (MAS) in maize. Furthermore, we confirmed our results with some major known disease resistance genes and most well-known gene family of nucleotide binding site (NBS) encoding genes. Our analysis revealed that disease resistance QTL were randomly distributed in maize genome, but were clustered at different regions of the chromosomes. Totally 389 QTL were observed for these three major diseases in diverse maize germplasm, out of which 63 QTL were controlling more than one disease revealing the presence of multiple disease resistance (MDR). 44 real-QTLs were observed based on 4 QTL as standard in a specific region of genome. We also confirmed the Ht1 and Ht2 genes within the region of real QTL and 14 NBS-encoding genes. On chromosome 8 two NBS genes in one QTL were observed and on chromosome 3, several cluster and maximum MDR QTL were observed indicating that the apparent clustering could be due to genes exhibiting pleiotropic effect. Significant relationship was observed between the number of disease QTL and total genes per chromosome based on the reference genome B73. Therefore, we concluded that disease resistance genes are abundant in maize genome and these results can unleash the phenomenon of MDR. Furthermore, these results could be very handy to focus on hot spot on different chromosome for fine mapping of disease resistance genes and MAS.