Grouping of Indian maize germplasm based on fertility and molecular diversity analysis of B group lines

Abstract

Extended summary: Baby corn cultivation in peri-urban areas offers an excellent opportunity to augment the farmer’s income. Baby corn has the immense potential to fetch foreign currency because of its huge demand in international market owing to its good taste, nutritive values, being free from pesticide residues and its utilization in preparation of food products. The cost of cultivation of traditional male fertile baby corn is high because the need of detasseling. This problem can be addressed by developing cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) based baby corn hybrids. Towards use of CMS based male sterile hybrid grouping of lines into maintainer (B) and restorer (R) is very essential. Towards this direction total 99 Indian maize lines were test crossed with CMS-C based source. Based on the tassel morphology, seed setting upon selfing and pollen viability test, the 27 test crosses were found to be sterile, 23 were semi-fertile and 49 lines were totally fertile. The 27 lines producing sterile test crosses were grouped as B line while 49 lines giving fertile test crosses were grouped as R line. The molecular diversity analysis was done for 21 lines, among the 27 of B group through 76 SSR molecular markers and grouped into four clusters. These molecular data may be useful for background selection in the conversion of B group lines into CMS line. Hence, with respect to baby corn traits CMS system will be useful in commercial baby corn hybrids production and molecular marker may accelerate to convert into CMS line and to develop sterile baby corn hybrids.