Development and crosstransferability of functionally relevant microsatellite markers in Dendrocalamus latiflorus and related bamboo species

Abstract

Bamboo belongs to subfamily Bambusoideae (family Poaceae), which comprises nearly 1200 species worldwide. Of these, 130 species representing 18 genera of Bambusoideae are found in India, making it a major hot spot of bamboo genetic resources (Sharma et al. 2008). Bamboo is an important forest resource due to its rapid growth rate, adaptability to harsh environment, high CO2 fixation rate, and hence, can be extremely important in reclaiming vegetative cover in deforested areas. Dendrocalamus latiflorus (Ma Bamboo) is a fast growing sympodial bamboo species that is of major economic importance, particularly in Asia (Lin et al. 2007). Bamboo has a remarkable life history with little genetic characterization. Microsatellite markers are used as tools for assessing genetic variation and dissecting complex traits. Nevertheless, such marker resource is severely limited in bamboo (Sharma et al. 2009; Lu et al. 2009; Ramalakshmi and Piramanayagam 2010) and nonexistent in D. latiflorus. Genic microsatellites derived from publicly available expressed sequence tag (EST) database have gained considerable importance because they are inexpensive to develop, ubiquitously dispersed in genome, codominantly inherited and often a putative function can be assigned (Provan et al. 2001; Chung et al. 2006). As genic simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are developed from expressed part of genome, these markers can be used across a number of related species (Barkley et al. 2005; Arya et al. 1993). They are proven as an efficient tool for assessing functional genetic diversity, genome wide association studies (GWAS) and linkage mapping (Varshney et al. 2005). However, existing SSR markers resource are not enough for various genotyping