Crop Improvement Division, Vivekananda Parvatiya Krishi Anusanthan Sansthan, Almora, 263 601, Uttarakhand, India.
*Corresponding author: E-mail: pawancrri@yahoo.co.in
Online published 15 July, 2009.
Maize is an important crop in the North-Western Himalayan states of India for food, feed and nutritional security of human population. Hybrid maize constitutes the major part of the maize area. Twenty four maize lines including the indigenous and exotic inbreds were amplified using 68 SSR primers, spread over the whole genome. The number of alleles across the primers ranged from two to eleven. The genotypes were grouped into different clusters using NTSYSpc2.11 programme. The clusters were well correlated with agronomic traits and resistance against turcicum blight. The PIC value was found to be highest for the primer bnlg1267 (0.84) while the lowest value was for the primer dupssr14 (0.09) with the mean value of 0.60. From this study we concluded that inbred V 359 is expected to give better combinations with CM 128, CM 129, V 340, V 357 and CM 212 for the development of hybrids suitable for the sub-tropical hill regions of India and elsewhere.
maize, microsatellites, dendrogram, Jaccard's similarity coefficient, principal component analysis
