Molecular and Morphological Profiling of Rice Cultivars Using Hypervariable Microsatellite Markers and DUS Descriptors

Abstract

Identification and protection of varieties is one of the most important tasks in the plant breeding programme. As the number of new varieties increasing year by year, there is a need to protect and maintain the purity of the varieties. DNA fingerprinting studies allows us to identify the plant varieties with high precision as it is not influenced by environment and other factors. In this context, the present study has been taken up for morphological and molecular profiling of 20 rice genotypes using 39 DUS descriptors and SSR markers. The field experiment was conducted during the year Kharif 2021 and Kharif 2022 at Agricultural Research Station, Bapatla and molecular profiling studies were conducted at RARS, Lam, Guntur.  Significant variations were observed for 16 morphological traits at different growth stages, which are relatively more informative in the identification and characterization of rice genotypes. A total of 45 polymorphic SSR markers were used to screen 20 rice genotypes, which produced 336 alleles. The number of alleles produced by these markers ranged from 3 (RM1048) to 15 (RM124) with an average number of alleles of 7.46 per marker. The PIC values of these markers ranged from 0.54 (RM1048) to 0.92 (RM124) with an average PIC value of 0.75. SSR based molecular profiles were developed using 12 highly polymorphic SSR markers viz., RM495, RM6933, RM489, RM6006, RM3351, RM510, RM418, RM3215, RM105, RM6364, RM144 and RM2972 for discrimination of each genotype as well as easy identification.