The genetic diversity and relatedness of eight rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars as revealed by AFLP and SSRs markers

The amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) markers were used in studying the genetic diversity of eight rice cultivars. The microsatellite markers were selected to fingerprint the eight rice cultivars under study. These markers were precisely selected in order to represent the entire rice genome. These SSR generated 46 markers, twelve out of them were polymorphic. The number of SSRs alleles per locus varied from 2 for RM133, RM 215 and RM433 to six for RM271, with a mean of 3.83 alleles per locus. Whereas, 245 polymorphic AFLP markers (nearly 87.21% of the total AFLP markers produced) were generated using five AFLP primer combinations. The polymorphism information content value for the two types of assays was 0.825 and 0.967 for SSR and AFLP markers, respectively. Pair-wise genetic similarity ranged from 0.393 to 0.783 and from 0.103 to 0.682 for AFLP and SSR, respectively. Cluster analysis was achieved based on SSRs and AFLP data and the relationship between the studied rice cultivars were addressed.