Genetic Diversity of Ginger Accessions in Benin Using SSR Markers

G.K. Zimazi, D. Montcho, A.A. Missihoun, P. Paulin, I.R. Agbo, O. Kolade and C. Agbangla

Background and Objective: The advent of molecular markers has provided breeders with a powerful tool, facilitating the search for new sources of variation and the study of genetic factors involved in the heritability of quantitative traits. This study aims to identify genetically distinct groups and detect the genetic structure of the 48 accessions under study. Materials and Methods: To do this, a selection of 20 ginger-specific SSR microsatellite markers was made for genotyping. Genomic DNA was extracted, followed by PCR amplification of target loci and the resulting amplicons were resolved by agarose gel electrophoresis. The gel profiles were subsequently scored to generate a database of alleles using standard procedures of assessing binary data, whereby the absence or presence of a band is coded as 0 and 1, respectively. The polymorphic information content (PIC) was computed to evaluate the discriminatory power of the marker using Darwin software version 6. It also made use of the Jaccard coefficient to calculate the pairwise genetic similarity/distance among accessions based on shared/unique bands and NTSYS 2.11 for Principal Component analysis. Results: The results show that all 16 SSR markers used for molecular characterization presented a good level of polymorphism (75%) and made it possible to structure the diversity into three distinct genetic groups. A total of 61 alleles were counted with an allelic richness (A) of 3.81. The polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 0.083 to 0.902, with an average of 0.540. Conclusion: The results obtained could contribute to the development of conservation strategies and optimization of the exploitation of ginger ecotypes cultivated in the country.

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