Assessment of morphological and molecular diversity among okra [<i>Abelmoschus esculentus</i> (L.) Moench.] germplasm

Abstract

Forty (40) RAPD primers and eight quantitative traits were used for the assessment of genetic diversity and establishing phenetic relationships in a set of 70 okra germplasm lines. Of the 40 RAPD primers, four namely, OPC-4, OPC-6, OPB-4 and OPB-5 did not show any amplification. A total of 170 RAPD scorable fragments were produced of which 92.94% alleles were observed to be polymorphic. Number of alleles scored per primer ranged from 2 to 7 with an average of 4.72 alleles per primer. PIC values ranged from 0 (OPC-5) to 0.89 (OPC-2) with an average value of 0.75. The genotypes were broadly divided into three clusters. Accession IC90171 appeared to be quite distinct as compared to other members of cluster I. Cluster III included five genotypes namely, IC117218, IC90165, IC117215, IC112496 and IC117217. Cophenetic r correlation value was found to be 0.94 suggesting that the cluster analysis strongly represents the similarity matrix. Genetic diversity as assessed by DARwin (based on quantitative morphological data) revealed that grouping of genotypes into different constellations did not follow any specific pattern suggesting independence of clustering pattern of the entries and their geographical origin.

Keywords: Decamer primers, Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), genetic diversity, yellow vein mosaic virus, yield

African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(21), pp. 3160-3170