The mapping populations and DNA markers used in thisstudy were the same as those of Han et al. (2005) andIsemura et al. (2007). The F2 population consisted of 141plants and BC1F1 population consisted of 187 plants.These populations were derived from the crosses between,V. nepalensis (accession JP107881), and Japanese culti-vated azuki bean, V. angularis (accession JP81481 a land-race from Tokushima Prefecture, Japan). In brief, V.nepalensis was crossed onto azuki bean to produce F1hybrid plants. An F1 plant was self-pollinated to producethe F2 population and at the same time other F1 plantswere crossed as female parent with azuki bean to developthe backcross population (BC1F1). BC1F1 and F2 weredesignated as populations “1” and “2” respectively. Thegenotype of the F2 and BC1F1 populations has been char-acterized by restriction fragment length polymorphismsand simple sequence repeat markers to cover the wholegenome with markers at 10–15 cM intervals (Han et al.2005; Isemura et al. 2007)