Abstract
Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is a legume crop known to be an excellent source of protein, tolerant to drought, waterlogging, and salinity. The crop is used as an alternative source of protein to reduce malnutrition for resource-poor people and farmers leaving in marginal areas. However, due to the presence of a neurotoxin that causes lathyrism in the crop, it has been neglected and underutilized. As a necessary first step towards, therefore, this investigation was undertaken to assess the genetic diversity and population structure that existed within grass pea accessions collected from North-West Ethiopia using simple sequence repeat markers. Twenty-five grass pea accessions collected from the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute were planted at the College of Agricultural Science, Ebonyi State University, Nigeria. The genomic DNA was extracted using Quick-DNA™ ZR Plant/Seed Miniprep Kit and amplified in an ABI Veriti PCR machine with 10 pairs of SSR markers in IITA, Ibadan, Nigeria. Out of 10 SSR primers, only eight primers were polymorphic. A total of 41 alleles were detected with an average of 5.13. The Polymorphism Information Content and Gene Diversity values ranged from 0.074 to 0.944 with a mean of 0.474 and 0.536 respectively. The largest pairwise genetic distance (0.365) was detected between North Gondar and East Gojjam populations. The ФPT (analog of FST test) estimated through AMOVA were 0.24, 0.20, and 0.05 for within accessions, among regions, and population within regions respectively. The highest genetic differentiation value (76%) resides within accessions followed by 20% among regions. Both the population structure and cluster analyses grouped the 25 grass pea accessions into two distinct subgroups. This grouping pattern indicates the presence of gene flow among geographic regions. In general, the findings of this study indicate that despite few numbers of SSR markers it was possible to detect genetic diversity among grass pea accessions indicating the power of the SSR marker in picking up the existing genetic diversity within the studied accessions.
Highlights
Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is the most important legume crop in Ethiopia which is rich in protein (28%-32%); and micronutrients, and used for the human diet and animal feed (Urga et al, 2005)
The spatial autocorrelation analysis figured to distinguish how far the grass pea accessions are separated upon the geographic distance showed a substantial correlation for accessions collected in a range of 30 km. This outcome designated that as the range of the collection between two accessions arises distant from each other, the genetic resemblance among the accessions started to drops in an account of the geographic distance. This finding was confirmed that the microsatellite/simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers previously developed by (Yang et al, 2014) and used by (Wang et al, 2015) for L.sativus and relative species were a reproducible and vital tool for the genetic diversity study
The result showed the existence of a moderate level of genetic diversity among the North-Western part of Ethiopian grass pea populations which largely reside within each accession
Summary
Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is the most important legume crop in Ethiopia which is rich in protein (28%-32%); and micronutrients, and used for the human diet and animal feed (Urga et al, 2005). There are 578 grass pea accessions in the collection preserved at the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (EBI), in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (https://www.ebi.gov.et/biodiversity/conservation/databasems/). It is the fifth major grain legume following fava bean, field pea, haricot bean, and chickpea regarding production, and area coverage (CSA, 2020). It has many significant traits like drought-tolerance, resistance to insect-pests, adaptability to numerous kinds of soil, and climatic conditions. It has been realized that grass pea can serve as a survival foodstuff in difficult situations (Parihar et al, 2013)
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