Vegetos

Abstract

Several varieties of wheat, the third staple food have been developed for particular character and suitability to microenvironment, against particular insect pest or disease. The time long cultivation is known to minimize the diversity present in different landraces and to access those markers like ISSR is of utmost importance. ISSR markers are highly polymorphic and are useful in studies on genetic diversity, phylogeny, gene tagging, genome mapping and evolutionary biology. In the present study, 22 ISSR primers were used to study the genetic diversity in 14 heat tolerant and 9 heat susceptible wheat varieties with polymorphism information content (PIC) ranging from 0.05 to 0.46 with an average of 0.23. The ISSR band profiling exhibited 49.4% total amplicon polymorphism for characterization of the heat tolerant and heat susceptible wheat varieties. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated sufficient genetic differentiation within populations and a low level of variation among populations of CZ, NEPZ & NWPZ. Population structure analysis elucidated distinct clustering of wheat genotypes as revealed by DARWIN which was further supported by principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) and STRUCTURE. The ISSR markers identified in this study are considered appropriate for wheat genetic profiling as well as in genetic purity test.