Genetic divergence studies through microsatellite markers in pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L) Millsp.]

The Genetic diversity was assessed among 96 pigeonpea accessions including 15 male sterile, 13 maintainer and 68 germplasm lines using 44 Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) markers distributed over all the 11 chromosomes. Out of 44 SSR markers, 33 were polymorphic which showed 75% polymorphism among the used markers. For an individual primer, the alleles amplified varied from 2 to 4 with an average of 2.54. The Polymorphic Information Content (PIC) values ranged from 0.26 (CCM 0183) to 0.78 (CCM 0402 and CCM 0721). Based on 112 alleles amplified by SSR markers, the 96 genotypes were alienated into eight clusters. Cluster I and cluster VII were the largest with 22 genotypes each, cluster III and duster IV were the smallest with two genotypes each, while cluster II, cluster V, cluster VI and cluster VIII consisted of 10, 15, 14 and 9 genotypes, respectively. Genotypes Pusa 991 and ULA 11 were found to be the most distant genotypes with highest dissimilarity coefficient (32%) where as AL 112A and AL 113A were the least distant genotypes with lowest dissimilarity coefficient (2%). Thus, highly distant genotypes can be used in pigeonpea improvement programs for getting desirable segregants. The selected panel of polymorphic SSR markers performed well in detection of genetic diversity patterns and can be used for future germplasm characterization studies in pigeonpea.