The inheritance of β-glucan concentration in three oat (Avena sativa L.) crosses

Several reports have indicated that oat beta-glucans may play an important role in reducing the incidence of degenerative diseases in humans. However, little information has been published on the inheritance of beta-glucan concentration in oat. The development of new cultivars with improved beta-glucan concentration would be simplified if the mode of inheritance is understood. Three experiments, each using two parental lines and their F-1, F-2, F-3, BC1F2 and BC2F2 generations, were carried out to determine the inheritance of beta-glucan concentration. The results indicate that beta-glucan concentration is controlled by a minimum of two or three factor pairs with a predominantly additive type of gene action. In the majority of the generations, beta-glucan concentration was found to be positively correlated with protein content and negatively correlated with oil content. It was not correlated with grain yield, number of panicles/plant, or number of kernels per panicle. The broad-sense heritability of beta-glucan concentration ranged from 0.45 to 0.58 in the F-2, and from 0.48 to 0.56 in the F-3 generations, suggesting that it may be relatively easy to develop new oat cultivars with high- or low-beta-glucan concentration.