As a global crop, maize quality and yield is affected by environmental conditions and pathogen exposures.
Participants or family members completed questionnaires targeting maize quality, storage, preparation, and consumption.
Test weight, moisture content, foreign material, and damage are among typical measures of maize quality and value.
Several recent association studies in plants have revealed the presence of epistasis in complex traits, including potato tuber quality, barley flowering time, and maize kernel quality [ 70- 72].
Most recently, nutritional quality is evaluated using MILK2006, a summative equation for calculating milk yield based on factors that affect whole-plant maize silage feed quality, including yield, dry matter (DM) content, neutral detergent fiber (NDF) content, NDF digestibility (NDFD), protein, and starch (Schwab et al. 2003).
Although small differences were found between the four types of storage, the hermetic polyethylene bags were shown to be a good option to maintain the maize grain quality.
Associations between maize forage quality traits and individual polymorphisms have been reported for the PAL, CCoAOMT2, and COMT genes [ 18, 20, 30] as well as for the ZmPox3 maize peroxidase gene, putatively involved in the oxidative polymerization of monolignols [ 31, 32].
In a word, our results are significant contributions to maize molecular breeding with enhanced quality traits.
The Wisconsin Quality Synthetic (WQS) maize population has undergone five cycles of recurrent selection for silage yield and composition, resulting in a genetically improved population.
The Wisconsin Quality Synthetic (WQS) maize population was developed by the University of Wisconsin maize breeding program nearly three decades ago and is currently in its fifth cycle of recurrent selection for high-quality stover and high forage yield (Frey et al. 2004; Gustafson et al. 2010).
Measurements included labor required for weed control, weed cover, and maize leaf, stem, and grain harvest and quality.
