Molecular identification of genetically distinct accessions in the USDA chickpea core collection

Knowledge of the molecular genetic variation of the accessions of core collections will be important for their efficient use in breeding programs, and for conservation purposes. The present study was undertaken for genotyping the part of the USDA chickpea core collection (Hannan et al 1994) with 20 microsatellite or simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. In addition to understand the molecular diversity in the core collection, the genetic relationship was studied. A total of 376 accessions from the USDA chickpea core collection were genotyped. Twenty SSR markers revealed a total of 388 alleles among the 376 accessions. In the USDA core collection, the shared allele frequency (SAF) varied from 7.5% to 47.5% with an average of 21.6%. In the present study, the structure of the population was determined by using K=4 based on model-based (Bayesian) clustering algorithm