Diversity and relationships among Turkish okra germplasm by SRAP and phenotypic marker polymorphism

Abstract

Germplasm characterization is essential and molecular markers provide valuable information for breeding programs. Sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) and phenotypic markers were studied to determine diversity and relationships among 23 okra (Abelmoschus esculentus (L) Moench) genotypes. The 39 combinations of forward and reverse SRAP primers were used to evaluate the 21 Turkish and two randomly selected USA genotypes as outgroups, and produced 97 scorable markers, of which 50% was polymorphic for all 23 genotypes. Seventeen out of the 23 genotypes (74%) were distinguished from each other with mean similarity of 0.93. As to phenotypic markers, 33 heritable traits were evaluated in field with ten replications, 28 of them (85%) were found to be polymorphic. The UPGMA (unweighted-pair group method arithmetic average) dendrogram based on the 33 phenotypic markers distinguished all genotypes, but failed to detect any geographic association of okra genotypes, being consistent with previous study. It can be concluded that SRAP markers are useful for studying diversity and relationships among okra germplasm, and have potential in marker-aided selection, linkage mapping, and evolutionary studies. © 2007 Institute of Molecular Biology, Slovak Academy of Sciences.