Diversity analysis of sugarcane genotypes by microsatellite (SSR) markers

Thirty (30) simple sequence repeat (SSR) primer pairs chosen randomly from the SSR primer collection were used to detect polymorphism in 17 sugarcane accessions. A total of 62 DNA fragments were generated by the 30 primers with an average of about 2.14 bands per primer. Bands that a primer yielded in the study ranged from 1 to 4. The genetic distances for SSR data using 17 sugarcane accessions, was constructed based on Nei (1978) and relationships between accessions were portrayed graphically in the form of a dendrogram. The value of genetic similarity ranging from 62.90 to 90.30% was observed among the 17 sugarcane accessions. The highest genetic similarity of 90.03% was seen among genotypes S-2003-US-118 and S-2003-US-312. From the present study, it may be concluded that SSRs markers are best tool for investigation of genetic diversity in sugarcane. Key words: Simple sequence repeat (SSR), polymorphism, genetic diversity.