Genetic Diversity Analysis of Chickpea using STMS Marker

Chickpea is the third most important pulse crop of the world. Molecular characterization of germplasm helps in identification of genetically diverse germplasm lines for use in crop improvement and in mapping the traits. Present study reports the molecular characterization of 20 Chickpea genotypes using a specific set of 20 polymorphic STMS (Sequence Tagged Microsatellite Site) markers. The number of alleles ranged from 1 to 3 alleles per locus. The PIC (Polymorphism Information Content) value ranged from 0 to 0.656 with an average of 0.268 indicating the considerable efficiency of markers for studying the polymorphism level. The primer GA-33 showed maximum PIC value (0.656), while the lowest PIC value 0.000 was observed for ten primers. The dendrogram derived from this analysis has four clusters viz; I, II, III and IV. It is concluded that the genotypes ICC-4495, ICC-3230, ICC-3512 and ICC-3946 deserves to be conserved. These genotypes exhibited the lowest similarity coefficient value of 0.75 with ICC-4495 indicating that the genotypes ICC-3230, ICC-3512 and ICC-3946 may be utilized for hybridization programmes for combining at least some desirable traits due to considerable degree of variability available among them due to diverse but related parents.