Transferability of Rice Microsatellite Primers (SSR) Across Six Major Crops

The high cost of developing microsatellite markers due to laborious cloning, sequencing and screening procedures lead to identification of universal or common genetic markers across crops through transferability. Since SSR markers are highly polymorphic, abundant and easy to use, they have become the marker of choice for genetic mapping, hybrid testing, population studies etc. Highly polymorphic and transferable molecular markers in oryza can be useful for exploiting the genetic resources of this genus and detecting allelic variants in loci associated with other important crops. Keeping these advantages in mind, transferability of 42 rice specific microsatellite (STMS) markers were studied in other major crops including cereals (wheat, oat, and pearl millet), oilseeds (soybean & sunflower) and pulse (chickpea). It is observed that 20 rice specific STMS markers were amplified in majority of the other crops. Among the above 20 primers, 17 primers found to amplify in wheat where as the number was 17, 19, 14, 13 and 9 in oat, pearl millet, sunflower, soybean and chickpea respectively. Transferability of single and multiple alleles were observed across the genera thus proved the enormous value in crop specific genomic studies like marker-trait association, QTL mapping and genetic diversity studies.