QTL analysis of early flowering of female flowers in Cucurbita pepo

The zucchini inbred line 19 showed significantly fewer days to blooming of the first female flower than the inbred line 113, which showed stable early flowering. Genetic analysis revealed that it is an inheritable quantitative trait and is controlled by multiple genes. Based on the QTL seq combined with linkage analysis and QTL mapping analysis, only one major locus was identified under all environmental conditions and was located in a 117 kb candidate region. Based on gene annotation, gene sequence alignment and qRTPCR analysis, we found that one gene may be a candidate gene for the opposite regulation of early flowering in zucchini.