Oscar Nnaemeka Obidiegwu

Abstract: Finger millet (E. coracana (L.) Gaertn.) provides food for millions of people in Africa and Asia. In this study, sequence data were mined at the database of National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) with the aim of developing polymorphic expressed sequence tags simple sequence repeat (EST-SSRs) markers. Three selected markers which showed clear polymorphism in pre-testing with 5 accessions were used to characterize some randomly selected 48 accessions from the pool of finger millet core set. The polymorphic information content (PIC) of the developed markers gave a value range of 0.6741 for marker UH-Ec-931 to 0.7658 for marker UH-Ec-958. The mean PIC value of 0.7171 was recorded. Marker UH-Ec-958 showed 13 alleles per locus while marker UH-Ec-956 showed 20 alleles per locus. The mean average allele per locus was 17. Following Nei’s approach, the mean gene diversity value of 0.7638 was captured by the three markers. Cluster analysis for the 48 selected accessions of finger millet showed four major clusters. Accessions from Zimbabwe and Zambia are distributed on the cluster I. Accessions from India are mostly found in cluster IV. Accessions from Nepal were found mostly on cluster III while Ugandan accessions are found in cluster II and III respectively. Our investigation showed that the developed EST-SSRs are quite effective in unraveling the nature of diversity in our studie