Abstract
BackgroundGrasspea (Lathyrus sativus L., 2n = 14), a member of the family Leguminosae, holds great agronomic potential as grain and forage legume crop in the arid areas for its superb resilience to abiotic stresses such as drought, flood and salinity. The crop could not make much progress through conventional breeding in the past, and there are hardly any detailed molecular biology studies due to paucity of reliable molecular markers representative of the entire genome.ResultsUsing the 454 FLX Titanium pyrosequencing technique, 651,827 simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci were identified and 50,144 nonredundant primer pairs were successfully designed, of which 288 were randomly selected for validation among 23 L. sativus and one L. cicera accessions of diverse provenance. 74 were polymorphic, 70 monomorphic, and 144 with no PCR product. The number of observed alleles ranged from two to five, the observed heterozygosity from 0 to 0.9545, and Shannon’s information index ranged from 0.1013 to 1.0980, respectively. The dendrogram constructed by using unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) based on Nei's genetic distance, showed obvious distinctions and understandable relationships among the 24 accessions.ConclusionsThe large number of SSR primer pairs developed in this study would make a significant contribution to genomics enabled improvement of grasspea.
Highlights
Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L., 2n = 14), a member of the family Leguminosae, holds great agronomic potential as grain and forage legume crop in the arid areas for its superb resilience to abiotic stresses such as drought, flood and salinity
Less than 205 microsatellite (SSR) markers have been published for grasspea, and only 61 of them were characterized for size polymorphism [7,8,9]
Plant material Eight grasspea (L. sativus) accessions consisted of two Chinese, two Asian, one African and three European accessions were used for the 454 sequencing
Summary
Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is an excellent candidate crop to provide protein and starch for human diets and animal feeds in the arid areas [1]. It is one of the hardiest crops for adaptation to climate change because of its ability to survive drought, flood and salinity [2]. It plays a vital role in many low input farming systems [3]. Sun et al, [9] analyzed a total of 8,880 Lathyrus genus ESTs from the NCBI database (up to March 2011), identified
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