Assessment of genetic diversity of rice (<i>Oryza sativa</i>) cultivars using ssr markers

Abstract

A set of 36 polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) primers well distributed on all the 12 rice chromo-somes have been used to assess the genetic diversity among the rice varieties. A total of 98 alleles were detected with an average of 2.78 alleles per locus across 39 genotypes.  The number of alleles varied from two to four of these SSR loci. Among the primers, RM 401, RM 20A, RM 536, RM 7575 and RM 5862 produced maximum number of alleles (4). Out of the 98 alleles, 86 were polymorphic and this exhibited 87.76% polymorphism. SSR marker analysis differentiated the genotypes into two distinct groups. The polymorphism information content (PIC) value of the markers ranged between 0.28 and 0.50 with a mean value of 0.45. The highest PIC value (0.50) was observed for ten primers that is, RM 2, RM 24, RM 411, RM 104, RM 266, RM 125, RM 4674, RM 247, RM 3476 and RM 3351 while the lowest was 0.28 for RM 29. The genetic similarity coefficients for 39 genotypes obtained with SSR markers ranged from 23.8 to 78.4%.

Keywords: Rice, genetic diversity, simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers

African Journal of Biotechnology, Vol 13(31) 3547-3552