Integrated Genome-Wide Association Studies to Dissect Natural Variation for Magnesium Ion Contents in Rice Germplasm

: Magnesium is important not only for the growth of rice itself, but also as an essential micronutrient component of half of the world population who are supported by rice. Here, we performed genome-wide association study (GWAS) with high-resolution density SNPs to identify natural allelic variation in Mg 2+ increase from rice set, which is derived from a total 24,368 rice germplasms. The range of the concentration and distribution of Mg 2+ in 295 core accessions of brown rice grain were wide, from 18.17mg/L to 57.11mg/L, with mean 39.71mg/L. In particular, GWAS result shows that the high peak found on chromosomes 3 and 11. The new natural variants identified through haplotyping analysis would be useful to develop new rice varieties with improved storage ability of the valuable mineral through the future molecular breeding.