摘要：Heterosis represents one of the most revolutionary advancements in crop *** the genetic dissection of heterosis,NCIII design is one of the most powerful and widely used mating ***,the methodologies for quantitative trait loci (QTL) detection in the design were mostly based on composite interval ***,in this study,our purpose was to develop a statistical method for mapping epistatic QTL associated with heterosis in the RIL-based NCIII ***,we derivated the expectations of two classical linear transformations,Z 1 and Z 2,while a quantitative trait was controlled by two QTL with digenic epistasis and arbitrary linkage under the F ∞ and F 2 metric ***,we constructed an epistatic genetic model that includes all markers on the whole genome simultaneously,and estimated all the parameters in the model by the empirical Bayes ***,a series of Monte Carlo simulation experiments was carried out to confirm the proposed *** results show that:(1) all the augmented genetic parameters for main-effect QTL could be rightly identified with satisfactory statistical power and precision;(2) the statistical powers in the detection of augmented epistatic effects were substantively affected by the signs of pure epistatic effects;(3) it is more difficult to detect epistatic QTL than to detect main-effect QTL;(4) statistical power is higher in the RIL-based NCIII design than in the F 2-based NCIII design,especially in the detection of the augmented epistatic effect that consists of two pure epistatic effects in opposite directions.