Genetic diversity in mango cultivars revealed by SSR markers

Abstract

The existing genetic diversity is the main source of variability in any fruit crop improvement program which serves as a gene pool for identifying superior alleles governing key horticultural traits through allele mining/association mapping. Therefore the first attempt was made to determine the genetic diversity in 60 mango cultivars using 100 leaf transcriptome sequence derived novel genic SSR markers. A total of 263 alleles were amplified with mean of 3.0 alleles per SSR locus. Size of the amplified alleles ranged from 130 to 300 bp. Mean polymorphic information content (PIC) was 0.45, which demonstrated the presence of moderately high amount of genetic variation between the selected mango cultivars. Neighbour Joining (NJ) tree analysis detected two major groups belongs to North-West and South-East India, Florida, USA and Brazil. The comprehensive molecular characterization of the present set of mango cultivars contributes to the knowledge about the levels and distribution of genetic diversity within these geographically diverse mango cultivars. In addition to that the information generated in this study could be utilized in association mapping and marker assisted selection in mango improvement programme.