Transferability of rice microsatellite markers (STMS) across cool season crops

Microsatellite markers exhibit high level of polymorphism and information in crop genomic research. Development of microsatellite markers is extremely expensive and time and labor consuming because of the prior requirement of sequence information for design of locus specific primers. Therefore, use of microsatellite markers developed for one species could be very valuable for related species. The transferability of these STMS primers indicates a high level of sequence conservation in these regions across species and thus improves the genomic resources of the species. In the present study, transferability of rice microsatellites were studied using three heat tolerant (Sonalika, Raj 4037, MACS 61–45) and three heat susceptible (DBW 17, CBW 38, HUW 234) wheat lines. A total of 46 rice STMS primers were used for the transferability study in wheat. It was observed that 16 rice microsatellite primers (viz. RM 212, RM 112, RM 3252, RM 106, in length that are present in genomes of all higher eukaryotes (McCouch et al., 2002; Chen et al.,2000; Pandian et al., 2000; A. Wunsch 2009). It is also known as simple sequence repeats (SSRs) or simple tandem repeats (STRS). Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) or DNA based micro satellites markers are an important class of molecular markers for genome analysis, gene mapping, estimation of genetic diversity and plant breeding applications. SSR markers have many advantages for genetic studies over other markers. Of these, microsatellite or simple sequence repeats (SSR) (Chen et al., 2000; McCouch et al., 2002; Singh et al., 2013) are very attractive since they are co- dominant, detect a high number of alleles per locus, and are abundant and uniformly dispersed throughout the genome. Besides, they are distributed over the genome and require only small amounts of genomic DNA for analysis. For the amplification of the regions between SSR, inter RM 3589, RM 351, RM 239, RM 217, RM 211, RM 6425, RM6538, RM178, RM341, RM224 RM 32 and SSR PCR technique employs 5′- or 3′ S-anchored RM 174) amplified inwheat. Nine RM primers showed as monomorphism, while seven microsatellite primers (viz. RM 3252, RM 217, RM6425, RM5638, RM178, RM341 and RM 224 amplified as polymorphism. This studied showed that rate of transferability of rice microsatellite primers among wheat cultivar have 34.78%. However, RM 224 amplified in all above heat tolerant cultivar including CBW 38 that's may be worked as codominant marker for screening of heat tolerant cultivars. Therefore, the above identified primers of rice were found to be invaluable for wheat genomic research.