Abstract
Maize (Zea mays L) originated from Mexico but has been introduced and domesticated in various parts of the world. Maize is an important cereal crop having subsistent, commercial and industrial uses. The aim of this study was to characterize genetic diversity in some African maize landraces using microsatellite DNA markers. Maize landraces were collected from some parts of Edo State, Nigeria, while others were sourced from IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture), Ibadan, Nigeria and Premier Seed Company, Nigeria. Fourteen populations of 15 plants each were characterized, the application of 7 microsatellite markers sufficiently provided information on genetic diversity of all 14 populations investigated. The study revealed a total number of 21 alleles across all loci, with a mean number of 3 alleles per locus. Polymorphic information content (PIC) ranged from 0.26 (umc1161) to 0.71 (umc1196), with a mean of 0.52, indicating that markers used were polymorphic. The dendrogram displayed two main clusters; cluster 1 had most populations from Nigeria grouped together with populations from Malawi and Togo, while populations from Guinea, Chad, Tzm-ese, Tzm-enee and Tzm-1340 from Kano, Nigeria grouped together in cluster 2. Population Tzm-1413 from Somalia in East Africa was a complete outlier, as revealed by the dendrogram. Results suggest that the populations studied were not greatly diverse but can be used to establish a field trial, where germplasm will be scored based on adaptation, tolerance and resistance to biotic and abiotic factors, which will furthermore validate the genetic variability revealed by the microsatellite markers.
Highlights
Maize (Zea mays L.) is a cereal crop of the Poaceae family widely cultivated in most parts of the world due to its adaptability and productivity (Gerpacio & Pingali, 2007)
This was lower than the results reported by Aci et al (2013) who observed a total of 87 alleles and a mean of 5.8 alleles across 18 loci on 15 Algerian accessions; Oppong et al (2014) who detected a total of 145 alleles and a mean of 7.3 SSR alleles per locus in a study of over 500 Ghanaian maize landraces, The differences in the number of alleles recorded in this study compared to other works could be due to the size of the sample studied and probably, the fewer number of loci analyzed
All the SSR loci were able to detect genetic diversity which is defined as the probability that 2 randomly chosen alleles from the population are different among the maize genotypes (Liu & Muse, 2005)
Summary
Maize (Zea mays L.) is a cereal crop of the Poaceae family widely cultivated in most parts of the world due to its adaptability and productivity (Gerpacio & Pingali, 2007). Landraces are heterogeneous populations which are genetically diverse and are typically selected by farmers for their adaptability potentials (Prasanna & Sharma, 2005) They are important genotypes for crop breeding owing to their ability to adapt to specific environmental conditions and the large source of genetic variability that they provide (Paterniani et al, 2000). SSRs are co-dominant; highly polymorphic and specific (Jones et al, 1997); little DNA is required; very repeatable; so cheap and easy to run; need a small amount of medium quality DNA; the analysis can be semiautomated and performed without the need of radioactivity (Guilford et al, 1997), and are highly transferable between populations (Gupta et al, 1999) They have been used in mapping the genome of corn (Taramino & Tingey, 1996), genetic fingerprinting (Senior et al, 1998), and to characterize landraces (Aci et al, 2013)
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