Assessment of Genetic Variation in the Indigenous Rice Cultivars (Oryza sativa L.) of Bangladesh

Abstract

Rice belongs to the family Gramineae which possesses enormous genetic diversity. A total of twenty six rice cultivars of Bangladesh were utilized in this study to investigate the genetic variation and molecular genotyping by using five microsatellites markers viz, RM25, RM251, RM259, RM307, RM413. Observed heterozygosity (Ho), expected heterozygosity (He), number of effective alleles (Ne), and polymorphism information contents (PIC) were calculated. The heterozygote deficiency or excess was detected by the fixation index (Fis). A total of 59 alleles were detected from five selected SSR primers. Results indicated that the number of alleles per locus ranged from 10 to 13. The genetic distance for all possible pairs of rice variety combination ranged from 0.000 to 2.890. The values of polymorphic information content (PIC) varied from 0.8484 to 0.9124, and according to the result the primer RM307 was found to be the most polymorphic. The dendrogram prepared on the basis of similarity matrix using the UPGMA algorithm based on Nei’s (1972) genetic distance delineated the used rice varieties into four major clusters with several sub-clusters. This molecular genotyping approaches will be helpful for exploiting varietal identification and conservation of rice cultivars in future.