Agro-morphological characterization and molecular diversity analysis of aromatic rice germplasm using RAPD markers

Aromatic rice has special significance because of its special flavour and economic value. The present investigation was undertaken to analyze the relatedness and distances among forty five aromatic rice genotypes using twenty agro-morphological characters and forty five randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers. The DNA amplification pattern revealed that out of 45 primers, 18 primers showed 100% polymorphism and a total of 374 RAPD loci were amplified with an average of 8.31 loci per primer comprising 343 polymorphic loci (92%) and 31 monomorphic loci (8.0%). In the clustering pattern using RAPD primers all genotypes were grouped into two groups having forty three and two genotypes, respectively. The major cluster was further sub grouped into five small groups having three, seven, six, twelve and fifteen genotypes, respectively. Wide divergence was detected among all genotypes for twenty agro-morphological characters.