Molecular Characterization of Mid-late Maturing Sugarcane Clones by Using Microsatellite Markers

A total of 56 alleles were obtained, of which 41 shared and 15 unique allelic variants were generated as the amplified product by polymerase chain reaction using eleven primer pairs. The PIC values revealing allelic diversity and frequency among the genotypes varied from 0.36 in the case of NKS 57 to 0.90 in the case of NKS 1 with an average of 0.62. The similarity coefficients revealing genetic similarity with respect to the size of the amplified products generated from targeted regions of the genome varied from 0.518 to 0.857 for the pairwise combinations amongst the thirteen entries under evaluation. Two Clusters were obtained when the phenol line was drawn at twenty-five similarity units. Cluster I consist of ten genotypes. The tri-genotypic cluster II consists of three genotypes. When phenol level drew at fifty similarity unit clusters I and II were further divided into sub-clusters. It is concluded that using an SSR marker is a very reliable approach for identifying diverse genotype(s) where phenotypic similarity of the cultivars leads to difficulty while selecting parents for hybridization.