Development of late temperate in vivo haploid inducers

In vivo doubled haploid technique has been widely used in advanced maize breeding programs due to cost, labor and time advantages and increase in efficiency. However, the number of available inducer lines in the world is sufficient. Six BC1 breeding populations including RWS and RWK-76 haploid inducer lines and late temperate ADK-451, ADK-737 and ADK-455 lines were developed by Sakarya Maize Research Institute (MRI) in Turkey. The RWS and RWK-76 haploid inducer lines were used as donors. Pedigree method was employed to develop the inducer lines. Anthocyanin coloration of plant, tassel length, branch number of tassel, plant height, days to flowering, embryo-endosperm colorfulness and haploid induction rate (HIR) were determined. The genotypes with the best characteristics were selected. The families from BC1F3 to BC1F7 were hybridized to liguleless line to determine the HIR and families with HIR over 8% were selected from BC1 populations. The HIR, plant height and days to tassel flowering values of in-1021 and in-1076 candidate haploid inducer lines were 10.5 and 12.3%, 195 and 200 cm, and 69 and 68 days, respectively. The HIR value of RWS donor haploid inducer ranged from 8.9 to 11.3% and for RWK-76 from 7.3 to 9.8%. Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) markers were used to identify genetic similarity between late temperate haploid inducer lines and donors. The similarity rates of in-1021 and in-1076 inducer lines to the RWS donor were 38 and 15%, and to the RWK-76 donor were 23 and 27%. The similarity rate between the two candidate inducer lines was 30%. The results indicated that the late temperate haploid inducer lines developed will increase the efficiency of maize breeding.