MORPHO MOLECULAR DIVERSITY OF PIGMENTED TRANSPLANT AMAN RICE GERMPLASM

Abstract

Genetic divergence at morphological and molecular levels were studied in 24 pigmented Transplant Aman germplasms during the period June 2019 to December 2019 at the Genetic Resources and Seed Division (GRSD), Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, Gazipur-1701. All the pigmented germplasms studied genetic variation in respect of qualitative traits. Large dissimilarity and genetic diversity also detected in quantitative traits. The germplasm Black rice-2, Black Rice-3, Black Rice-4, Biroin (Habai), Kach Badal, Murali, Jhoria, Butu Balam (2), Latisail were identified as highly polymorphic and could be used for future breeding programs. A total of 70 alleles were detected from 16 microsatellite markers across 24 rice germplasms. The number of alleles per locus ranged from one (RM510) to eight alleles (RM1), with an average of 4.38 alleles across the 16 loci obtained in the study. The highest band size for a given microsatellite locus varied between 171bp to 350bp (RM1337). Gene diversity ranged from 0.15 to 0.82 with an average of 0.4843. The polymorphism information content (PIC) values which ranged from 0.14 (RM307) to 0.80 (RM1), with an average of 0.445 revealed much variation among the studied germplasm. Primer RM1 had the highest PIC value (0.80) and the highest number of alleles (8), therefore it detected the highest level of polymorphism. So, RM1 is considered to be the best marker for characterizing the 24 pigmented T. Aman rice germplasms. Besides, PIC value revealed that RM1, RM206, RM1337, RM5 and RM334 can also be considered as additional markers for characterizing 24 pigmented rice germplasms. Eighteen (16) unique alleles were detected by 9 SSR markers. The genetic distance was calculated using the Nei distance. The highest genetic distance was 0.8750 which was observed between Biruin (Tola) and Lal Balam. The genetic distance-based results seen in the unrooted neighbor-joining tree revealed three groups with six subclusters in the 24 test germplasm. Evaluation of morpho-molecular characters demonstrated

that the pigmented T. Aman rice germplasm under the present study possess a high genetic

diversity and showed unique features of valuable genes for safe conservation in Gene banks

and their sustainable utilization in future breeding programs.