Strong linkage disequilibrium near the selected Yr17 resistance gene in a wheat experimental population

Dynamic management (DM) is a method of genetic resources conservation that aims at maintaining evolutionary process in subdivided populations cultivated in contrasted environments. Such populations are often submitted to strong natural selection as it was the case for experimental wheat populations maintained under DM. Understanding impacts of selection on genetic diversity around selected genes is necessary for the middle-term maintenance of genetic variability in DM populations. Evolution of diversity at six neutral markers located near the yellow rust resistance gene Yr17 has been studied for the parental lines and for generations 1, 5, 10 and 17 in one of the DM populations. Yr17 provided complete resistance to yellow rust in France until 1997 and thus was suspected to be under strong selection. The gene is located on a fragment introgressed in winter wheat from a wild species. The presence of the gene was estimated using a marker closely related to the gene. We showed that the Yr17 gene has been selected between generations 5 and 10. Generally, selection tends to reduce diversity around selected genes, generating linkage disequilibrium (LD) between a gene and adjacent markers. Here, the major effect of the Yr17 gene selection was a reduction of multilocus diversity and the maintenance of strong pre-existing LD in the zone surrounding the gene for a distance of 20 cM. As expected, the presence of the exogenous introgression was responsible for restrictions to recombination which contributed to the maintenance of strong correlations between loci. However, we found a noticeable number of recombinations around the gene indicating a progressive incorporation of the fragment into the wheat genome.