Determination of Genetic diversity of cultivated chickpea (Cicer arietinumL.) using Medicago truncatula EST-SSRs

Expressed sequence tags simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs) are important sources for investigation ofgenetic diversity and molecular marker development. Similar to genomic SSRs, the EST-SSRs are usefulmarkers for many applications in genetics and plant breeding such as genetic diversity analysis, molecularmapping and cross-transferability across related species and genera. In spite of low polymorphism, thesemarkers show variation in the expressed part of the genome. In this study, Medicago truncatula EST-SSRswere used for investigation of transferability between M. truncatula and some chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)genotypes, also genetic diversity between used chickpea genotypes was determined. In this research, 650 M.truncatula ESTs were searched to find simple sequence repeats (SSRs). A total of 131 EST-SSRs werecontained di-and trinucleotide motif SSRs. In this study, thirty pairs of primers were designed to amplify over10 chickpea genotypes. Thirteen primer pairs (43%) generated reproducible bands in at least one chickpeagenotype that eight bands (61.5%) were polymorphic in the chickpea genotypes. A total of 24 alleles wereamplified with an average of 3 alleles per primer. The average of polymorphism information content (PIC)was 78.75% and transferability across M. truncatula and C. arietinum was 43.32%. The results indicate thatthe developed EST-SSR markers from M. truncatula as a model plant are valuable genetic markers forlegume species such as chickpea. In addition to suitability of EST-SSR markers for genetic diversity analysis,their broad range of transferability also proved their potential for comparative genomics studies.

Determination of Genetic diversity of cultivated chickpea (Cicer arietinumL.) using Medicago truncatula EST-SSRs Keywords:

EST-SSR markers , genetic diversity , chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) , Medicago truncatula