Vegetos

Abstract

Pea is one of the most important com-mercially cultivated legume crops of the world. It is among the four important cultivated legumes next to soybean, groundnut and beans. While various molecular marker techniques have been used to characterize the pea germplasm, this study is the first one to evaluate the potential of SRAP markers at inferring genetic diversity among Indian cultivated pea genotypes. A total of 109 bands were generated by 19 SRAP pri-mers with 12 pea varieties, of which 90 bands were polymorphic (84.41%). The PIC value ranged from 0.249–0.848 with an average of 0.696. A dendrogram generated through UPGMA cluster analysis for SRAP markers separated all the varieties into two main clusters. Cluster-I & cluster-II consist of three and eight varieties re-spectively, whereas, other one variety AP-03 was out of group. AP-01 was most diverse among three or comes in out group, which is 43% similar whereas, AP-03 was the most diverse among all 12 pea varieties. A two-dimensional plot gener-ated from principal co-ordinate analysis of SRAP data also supported the clustering pattern of dendrogram. This study indicated the presence of high genetic diversity among pea varieties, which could be used for developing core collec-tions of pea germplasm for breeding and germplasm management purposes.