Development of a Nested Association Mapping population for complex traits dissection in Brassica napus – BrassiNAM

Rapeseed is the oilseed crop most widely cultivated in Europe.The cultivated surface kept growing since 2003 as a consequence of the development of non-food uses of rapeseed oil while the demand for human feeding remained high.
Recently the demand for arable products and vegetable oil in particular, has increased dramatically. This is mainly due to the growing world population and the related demand for food and to the increasing demand for bioenergy.
It is also becoming clear that to satisfy demand, productivity of arable crops, and more precisely oil crop, will need to be improved. At the same time inputs need to be reduced for both economic and ecological reasons.
Genetic progress is of major interest in the context of low input-systems/sustainable agriculture
During the last years a technological breakthrough was observed in the domain of plant genetic improvement with the development of high throughput sequencing and genotyping technologies. Very promising results were also recently obtained using genetic association approaches to analyse traits.
Association of new genotyping technologies and new methodologies for genetic data analysis, allow successful analysis of complex traits.
Recently, the field of plant association genetics pioneered the use of a new type of association populations, designed to incorporate advantages of both linkage based and linkage disequilibrium based quantitative trait dissection approaches, in association studies.
This population named NAM for Nested Association Mapping, was successfully developed in maize and is being developed in wheat.
This kind of population is of great interest to validate quickly and at a large scale, candidate genes and to deeply characterize QTL in plants
The aim of the OSR_NAM project is to develop a NAM population in oilseed rape which will give to scientific and breeders involved in oilseed rape improvement, a major tool for high resolution genetic mapping.
This resource will be developed by two laboratories leader in genetics, genomics and genotyping. The project will gather public and private research. This secures the use of the resource at once for basic and applied research, to put in the market new varieties with improved agronomical traits.