Molecular Characterization of Early Maturing Sugarcane Clones Using Microsatellite Markers

Sugarcane is an important cash crop of the entire world including India. It alone contributes to 75% of the worldwide sugar trade. Molecular markers are powerful tools and provide the basis for the estimation of genetic variability to start reasonable breeding program. Microsatellite markers have unique ability to determine the extent of genetic divergence among sugarcane genotypes. The objective of this study was to evaluate the genetic divergence of 12 early maturing sugarcane clones using 11 SSR markers. A total 55 alleles were found during the amplification of the primers out of which 21 alleles were found unique and 34 alleles were shared. The number of shared alleles per locus ranged from two out of five alleles in the case of primer NKS 1 and nine out of ten alleles in NKS 34. Similarly no. of unique alleles per locus ranged from one out of ten alleles in NKS 34, three out of six alleles in NKS 57. The primer pairs NKS 1 and NKS 8 generated considerably greater percentage of unique alleles. The PIC values revealing allelic diversity and frequency among the genotypes varied from 0.034 in case of NKS 48 to 0.778 in case of NKS 9 with an average of 0.549. Pair-wise combinations of CoSe15451 and CoSe15452 showed the highest similarity with the value of similarity coefficient (0.890). The lowest value of similarity coefficient was found to be 0.490 in the pair CoBln15501 and CoSe01421. The dendogram based on SSR marker analysis grouped the 12 sugarcane clones into four clusters which shows the CoSe15451 and CoSe15452 clones had maximum similarity and CoBln15501 and CoSe15452 clones had maximum diversity between each other.