1Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, B. A. College of Agriculture, Anand Agricultural University, Anand-388 110, India
2Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, N. M. College of Agriculture, Navsari Agricultural University, Navsari-396 450, India
*E-mail: soni1211@gmail.com
Online published on 24 December, 2014.
Genetic diversity is used for identifying diverse parents in plant breeding programmes. The narrow genetic diversityis main limitation for popcorn improvement. Theefforts were made to study the genetic diversity among ten popcorn inbred line using Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) profiling. Fifteen random RAPD markers were used for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification after screening. The similarity matrix was estimated by Jaccard's similarity coefficient. The lines, I-07-35-7-3 and I-07-63-18-3 revealed highest divergence (0.86) and I-07-42-1-2 an I-07-42-6-3 and I-07-42-6-3 and I-07-63-1-2 were the less divergence (0.49). The cophenetic correlation showed that the Unweighted Pair-Group Method Using Arithmetic Averages (UPGMA) was reliable to discriminate the genotypes. Higher levels of heterozygosity are expected from crosses involving lines, I-07-35-7-3, I-07-63-18-3, I-07-43-7-3 and I-07-63-36-1 as parents and these lines are found to be promising for further study. Also, RAPD marker was efficient in discriminating popcorn lines revealing its importance in diversity studies.
Genetic diversity, Molecular marker, Polymorphism, Popcorn, RAPD
