Discrimination of chickpea (cicer arientinum L.) genotypes in response to drought with SSR markers

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the world’s second most important food legume crop, cultivated in marginal lands of the arid and semi-arid regions, in which its harvest is reduced up to 50% by drought stress. Simple sequence repeat (SSR) being available in most parts of eukaryotic genomes are variable regions which can be represented as polymorphism in a quantitative trait by PCR. In this study, 8 SSR primers were used to detect tolerant chickpea genotypes from sensitive ones; of which seven pairs created an obvious polymorphism. The primers and electrophoresis produced a total of 39 polymorphic alleles. genomic DNA amplification using Polymorphic information content (PIC) ranged between 0.26 to 0.83. Cluster analysis algorithm based on the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) and Jaccard similarity coefficients for molecular data categorized the genotypes into four main clusters. Tolerant genotype MCC544 to drought and salinity placed in a separate cluster, indicating the maximum genetic differences from other genotypes. In this cluster analysis, genotypes MCC552 and MCC352 had the highest relationship compared with others. Scatter plot graphs based on two criteria, Jaccard similarity and the Cophentic correlation coefficient, also confirmed a considerable genetic differences between MCC392 (tolerant) and MCC252 (sensitive) genotypes. The results showed that SSR markers can be used reliably as markers of the choice to distinguish high levels of polymorphism for accelerating the selection and breeding processes.

Keywords:

Chickpea , SSR marker , Polymorphism , Drought stress