Abstract

Marker assisted selection for resistance to Northern Corn Leaf Blight (NCLB) caused by Exserohilum turcicum has been carried out for three years at University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, India. The objectives were to screen resistant and susceptible maize inbreds for E. turcicum to identify polymorphic SSR markers closely-linked to known genes for NCLB resistance and used these polymorphic markers to validate in F2 progenies. Among 36 inbred lines screened under artificial epiphytotic condition, lines DMIT 126 and DMIT 136 showed high resistance (score 1) and high susceptiblity (score 5) for TLB, respectively and were used to develop F2 population. Single marker analysis (SMA) was performed using 248 F2 plants to determine the strength of association between resistance linked markers and disease resistance by calculating simple linear regression coefficient. Two markers Phi 330507 and Umc 1221 showed significant association with resistance to TLB with the R2 (PVE) and LOD score of 13.77 and 8.01%, 22.72 and 13.94, respectively. This result indicated that the validation of two SSR markers linked to TLB resistance was promising in application for molecular-assisted selection for improving TLB resistance in maize breeding programmes.