Abstract

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.) is an old oilseed crop with a 1.4 GB genome size and its flowers are used for food coloring, dyes and pharmaceutical industries. It was domesticated from its putative wild ancestor Carthamus palestinus about forty-five hundred years ago in the fertile crescent region.The current study was aimed to determine the genetic diversity, population structure and to check the applicability of iPBS-retrotransposons markers. Eleven POGP primers yielded 70 bands of which 61 were highly polymorphic with 87.14% polymorphism. A great level of genetic variation was examined with higher values of overall gene diversity (0.27), genetic distance (0.53), number of effective alleles (1.46), Shannon's information index (0.41) and polymorphism information contents (0.71). Analysis of molecular variance revealed high genetic variation with 79% within the population. The STRUCTURE, PCoA and Neighbor-joining analysis separated the safflower germplasm into 2 major populations and 1 un-classified population. The accessions which were from Asian countries i.e., China, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan were genetically similar and clustered together in both populations A and B. The maximum genetic distance was measured 0.88 between Pakistan 26 x Pakistan 24. Findings of this research such as maximum diversity indices, higher PIC values showed the effectiveness and utility of POGP markers for the evaluation of genetic relationships among safflower accessions. The results of this study also showed that POGP markers are less effective compared to ISSRs, iPBS-retrotransposons and DArTSeq markers. AMOVA showed high genetic variation (79%) within a population and maximum genetic distance was found between the accessions Pakistan 26- Pakistan 24 and may be suggested as candidate parents for future breeding activities of safflower. The accessions from the fertile crescent region were clustered together and proved the origin of safflower domestication. This study highlights genetic variation among safflower germplasm and could be helpfull for parental selection and planning for future breeding programs.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.