Microsatellites as a Tool to Evaluate and Characterise Bread Wheat Core Collection

Abstract

Hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is one of the most important crop species. 5778 accessions of winter wheat and 3929 accessions of spring wheat are hold in RICP Gene bank. Core collection is used to be established as tool for germplasm study, conservation of genetic variability and for the identification of useful genes. This information is valuable for breeders when a source of new alleles is needed~~~This study examines the use of neutral genetic markers to guide sampling from a large germplasm collection with the objective of establishing from it a smaller, but genetically representative sample. Genetic variation of 430 bread wheat accession was analysed using 40 microsatellite loci, covering all three wheat genomes and all 42 chromosomes (\citeauthor*{ch94:roder1998} \citeyear{ch94:roder1998}). The cultivars originated from 32 countries mainly of the Europe. For 40 microsatellite loci, 542 alleles were detected. The average number of alleles per locus was 13.6. Cluster analysis based on microsatellites data showed that diversity in the studied file of bread wheat accessions is not randomly distributed. It can be explained mainly by geographical and by temporal impact to the breeding processes in different countries during last century~~~Accessing diversity at the molecular level using microsatellite analysis gave us valuable information on the genetic structure of bread wheat core collection and provided new insights on diversity of the set of winter bread wheat