Studies on Molecular Diversity in Maize Inbreds Using SSR Markers

This study was conducted to determine molecular diversity among twenty maize genotypes using ten simple sequence repeat (SSR) primer sets. The number of alleles per marker varied from two to four with average of 2.5 alleles. Bnlg1922 detected maximum of four alleles, while five loci (bnlg1866, mmc0063, bnlg1046, bnlg1070 and umc1310) revealed three alleles, three loci (bnlg1523, bnlg1126 and umc1414) detected two alleles. One primer out of ten viz. phi041 studied failed to amplify any band and showed monomorphic pattern. The PIC values of the SSR loci varied from 0.43 (umc1414) to 0.91 (bnlg1070) with mean of 0.70. SSR markers being co-dominant in nature identified heterozygotes among the twenty inbreds lines. Out of ten markers, one marker bnlg1523 did not show any heterozygote, while others detected one to nine heterozygotes out of twenty inbred lines. The pair wise similarity was calculated by Jacquard's similarity coefficients, which ranged from 0.12 to 0.73 with an average similarity of 0.42.The minimum similarity (0.12) was found between two pairs, HUZM-356 with HUZM-47 and HUZM-53 with HUZM147 which are more diverse. The less diversity and maximum similarity (0.73) was found between HUZM-147 with HUZM-36 genotype.