Molecular Diversity in Castor Germplasm Collection Originated from North-Eastern Hill Province of India.

Abstract

A total of fifty one accessions of castor (Ricinus communis L.) germplasm collected from North-eastern hill region of India were employed for current investigation involving 35 castor EST-SSR marker for polymorphism at genetic level. Seventy six alleles with an average frequency of 2.14 band per primer was generated among which 29 were polymorphic with a polymorphic percentage of 82.8. The number of allele ranged between 3 and 2 based on which PIC value was generated between 0.04 - 0.73 with an average PIC value of 0.38. The genetic similarity index used for dendrogram, resulted into 3 major and 6 minor clusters with a Dice similarity coefficient ranging from 0.65 to 0.90. Confusion probabilities and limit of discriminating power ranged from 0.021 to 0.623 with a mean of 0.402 and 0.348 to 0.979 with a mean of 0.598 respectively. Highly diversity genotypes can be used for crop improvement programme like tagging of germplasm, identification or elimination of duplicates in the gene stock, establishment of core collections, sorting of populations for genome mapping and in breeding program to obtain more variability in the castor crops.