Physiological, Qualitative and Molecular Markers Based Evaluation of Mango Cultivars

In this investigation of mango cultivars, five physiological parameters, six quality parameters and three molecular markers (RAPD, ISSR and SSR) were employed to measure the discriminatory power of marker and to select lines that can be used as potential parents in a future breeding program. Three principal components were extracted (PC1, PC2 and PC3) from both physiological and qualitative characters showed that all physiological characters such as fruit weight, fruit volume, peel weight, pulp weight and stone weight had maximum contribution (83.28%) to total variance. It was also observed that cultivar Neelkrit could be utilized as a good parent for the breeding program, since it contained high amount of TSS (16.15%) and ascorbic acid (5.11%), while Malgoa and Totapuri could be used as a good candidate for the improvement regarding physiological traits. From the study, it was concluded that Malgoa and Totapuri showed maximum diversity from the rest of the cultivars. SSR marker was found to be a good choice for estimating variability in mango as it revealed 71.86 per cent polymorphism and could act as an important molecular flag for selecting target trait and development of mapping population in mango.