Assessment of genetic diversity among basmati and non-basmati aromatic rices of India using SSR markers

Abstract

Understanding the genetic diversity among aromatic rice local land races would be useful for their effective utilization in breeding programmes aimed at rice grain quality improvement. The study was conducted to analyse the genetic diversity among 16 aromatic short grain local land races collected from various parts of India and 30 basmati local land races collected from the traditional basmati growing areas, using 26 hyper-variable simple sequence repeat markers spanning the rice genome. Both the aromatic groups could be discriminated by either single (RM28102) or combination of two (RM577 + RM30) markers. Based on the similarity co-efficient values, genotypes were classified into two major clusters with 70% dissimilarity revealing presence of high diversity. The information generated from the present study would be useful in genetic purity assessment, varietal identification for plant variety protection, mapping of genes and background selection for recipient genome recovery in marker-aided breeding programmes aimed at aromatic rice improvement.