Validation of Genetic Purity among Hybrid Lines in Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.) using RAPD and SSR Markers

Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.) is one of the widely grown cereal crops in the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa and India. The objective of this study was to assess genetic diversity of 13 genotypes (5 hybrids, 5 female and 3 male varieties) using Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) markers. Thirteen decamer primers could generate a total of 220 RAPD fragments, of which 184 were polymorphic with average polymorphism of 83.36%. A total of 10 SSR markers were used out of which 4 markers were found to be polymorphic and amplified total 18 alleles. RAPD and SSR marker data analyzed using clustering algorithms were able to distinguish hybrid and parental lines. Polymorphism information content (PIC) for RAPD and SSR analysis ranged from 0.84 to 0.96 and 0.49 to 0.74, respectively. The Jaccard's similarity coefficient based on RAPD and SSR analysis was 0.20 and 0.39, respectively. The cophentic correlation (r) value for cluster analysis for RAPD and SSR was 0.85 and 0.91, respectively. The RAPD and SSR markers showed marker index (MI) values of 4.35 and 4.32 and arithmetic mean hetrozygosity (H_av) of 0.91 and 0.67, respectively.