Genetic Diversity Among Heat Tolerant and Susceptible Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Cultivars by Employing RAPD Markers

In the present study, 24promising wheat cultivars/genotypes were subjected to analysis by 20 RAPD primers for identification and determination of different varieties of wheat and simultaneously to unzip the genetic relatedness among them. Out of 20 decamer primers, 14 were found to be polymorphic, amplified a total of 90 alleles of which 76 (84.44%) were polymorphic with an average of 6.43 alleles per primer. The number of alleles per primer ranged from 5.0 to 10.0 andthe polymorphism information content (PIC) value ranged from0.5 to 0.96 with an average of 0.72. Cluster analysis based on Jaccard's similarity coefficient using UPGMA grouped the 24 wheat entries into two major clusters with an average similarity index of 0.28. A diagrammatic representation of DNA fingerprints of the rice cultivars based on 14 informative RAPD markers have been developed for ready reference to be used in similar kind of work.