Crop Improvement Division, Vivekananda Parvatiya Krishi Anusanthan Sansthan, Almora 263 601, Uttarakhand, India
*Corresponding author. E-mail: kalyan_biotek@yahoo.co.in
Online published - 20 December, 2008.
Fifty microsatellite or simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, spread across the maize genome were used for analyzing a set of 19 elite Quality Protein Maize (QPM) lines, including seventeen lines developed in India and two at CIMMYT, Mexico. Polymorphic profiles for 47 SSR loci have aided in differentiating the QPM inbred lines. The polymorphism information content (PIC) values among the inbreds ranged from 0.06 (umc2229) to 0.70 (umc1071) with an average of 0.45 per primerpair. The genetic relationships as indicated by the cluster analysis of SSR data were largely in congruence with the known pedigree of the QPM lines. The study resulted in identification of two SSR markers, umc1071 and umc1063 with higher PIC values of 0.70 and 0.64, respectively. The tryptophan content among the genotypes was found to vary considerably. Two genotypes viz., VQL 2 and VQL 8 were found to differ significantly for tryptophan content (0.51% and 0.94%, respectively). Both these QPM genotypes being derived from the same non-QPM parent CM 145, makes them ideal for mapping of modifiers for tryptophan content.
Quality Protein Maize, SSRs, tryptophan, Jaccard's similarity coefficient
