Evaluation of Genetic Diversity in Wheat Cultivars and Breeding Lines using Inter Simple Sequence Repeat Markers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe genetic diversity of thirty wheat genotypes was evaluated using inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers. The ten ISSR primers amplified a total of 86 bands in the set of thirty wheat accessions, of which 69 bands (80.2%) were polymorphic. The ISSR primers informativeness was assessed by calculating four marker parameters like polymorphism information content (PIC), effective multiplex ratio (EMR), marker index (MI) and resolving power (RP) were calculated. The majority of the primers showed PIC value close to the average (0.21–0.23), while EMR feature varied from 1.8 to 12 with a mean value of 5.69. The MI values ranged between 0.41 and 3.36. The primers that showed higher polymorphism had higher EMR and MI values. The estimates of RP ranged from 7.2 to 16.5 with an average of 12 per primer. Three of the ISSR primers possessed high RP values (14.9, 15.7 and 16.5) and therefore seemed to be the most informative primers for distinguishing the genotypes. The genotyping data for all the ISSR markers were used to assess genetic variation in wheat accessions by CLINK- based dendrogram and principle coordinate analysis (PCoA). Both of the methods classified the 30 wheat accessions in five groups and presented similar grouping of the genotypes with some minor disagreements. The results showed that the studied ISSR markers provided sufficient polymorphism and reproducible fingerprinting profiles for evaluating genetic diversity of wheat genotypes. The molecular variation evaluated in the present study, in combination with agronomic and morphological characteristics of wheat, can be useful in traditional and molecular breeding programs.