Plant materials

A search was conducted within pedigrees of AAFC SCRDC durum wheat lines to identify DT696 derivatives among advanced breeding lines using an in-house script of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) software version 9.3 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA) that enabled retrieval of pedigrees from crosses made with DT696 and its secondary and tertiary derivatives. This identified 72 populations with a total number of 716 lines derived from DT696 (Supplementary file ³ online). GWAS was conducted on 223 lines selected based on expressing a moderate FHB resistance phenotype in breeding trials conducted prior to the present study. These lines were also selected to sample recombination at the two FHB resistance QTL on chromosomes 5A (5A1 and 5A2) reported from QTL mapping of the DT707 × DT696 population². Thirteen contemporary breeding populations active in the breeding program were used for marker validation. These populations totalling 523 lines were developed from crosses between advanced breeding lines and the cv. Transcend which is a moderately susceptible durum variety derived from DT696⁴.