Analysis of the genetic structure and diversity of upland cotton groups in different planting areas based on SNP markers

Genetic diversity, kinship and population genetic structure analyses of Gossypium hirsutum germplasm can provide a better understanding of the origin and evolution of G. hirsutum biodiversity. In this study, adopt 273 elite upland cotton cultivar accessions collected from around the world, and especially from China to get 1,313,331 SNP molecular markers, it were used to construct a phylogenetic tree of each sample using MEGAX, to perform population structure analysis by ADMIXTURE software and principal component analysis (PCA) by EIGENSOFT software, and to estimate relatedness using SPAGeDi. ADMIXTURE software divided the experimental cotton population into 16 subgroups, and the Gossypium hirsutum samples could be roughly clustered according to source place, but there were some overlapping characteristics among samples. The experimental cotton population was divided into six groups according to source to calculate the genetic diversity index (H), and the obtained value (0.306) was close to that for germplasm collected by others in China. Cluster 4 had a relatively high genetic diversity level (0.390). The degrees of genetic differentiation within the experimental cotton population groups were low (the population differentiation indexes ranged from 0.02368 to 0.10664). The genetic distance among cotton accessions varied from 0.000332651 to 0.562664014, with an average of 0.25240429. The results of this study may provide a basis for mining elite alleles and using them for subsequent association analysis.