About the Authors

Xuehui Li

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

Yuanhong Han

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

Yanling Wei

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

Ananta Acharya

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

Andrew D. Farmer

Affiliation National Center for Genome Resources, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America

Julie Ho

Affiliation Forage Genetics International, Davis, California, United States of America

Maria J. Monteros

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

E. Charles Brummer

ecbrummer@noble.org

Affiliation Forage Improvement Division, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America

Competing Interests

JH is employed by Forage Genetics International, a commercial alfalfa breeding company. The Noble Foundation employs ECB, MJM, XL, YH, and YW and has a cooperative research agreement with FGI on alfalfa research and product development. Future cultivars developed by the Noble Foundation may be marketed by FGI. FGI has and is funding research projects at the Noble Foundation, although their funding was not involved in this project. The FGI-Noble cooperative work does not involve the project under review here. FGI does not own the germplasm evaluated in this project. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: ECB MJM. Performed the experiments: XL YH YW AA ADF JH. Analyzed the data: XL YH YW AA ADF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: ECB ADF MJM. Wrote the paper: XL ECB MJM YW YH AA JH ADF.