Drought stress, heat stress, and combination of drought stress and heat stress have been recognized as the major abiotic constraints to maize yields in the main production regions. The phenotypic data used in the current study had been published by Jill E. Cairns et al in 2013 in the journal of Crop Science 53 :1335–1346 (https://dx.doi.org/10.2135/cropsci2012.09.0545). In this study, the association mapping and genomic prediction analyses were conducted in a collection of 300 tropical and subtropical maize inbred lines to reveal the genetic architecture of grain yield and flowering time under well-watered, drought stress, heat stress, and combined drought and heat stress conditions. The genetic architecture information of the grain yield and flowering time revealed in this study, and the genomic regions identified for the different trait-environment combinations are helpful accelerating the efforts on rapid development of the stress-tolerant maize germplasm through marker-assisted selection or genomic selection.
