Identification of Durum Wheat Cultivars by a Minimum Number of Microsatellite Markers

A quick and reproducible tool for cultivar identification is useful to assess in certified seed production programs and to resolve legal conflicts. Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) have been the elected markers to carry out cultivar identification studies. The main aim of this research was to define the minimum number of SSR markers to distinguish 80 durum wheat cultivars. Preliminary, an analysis of 11 SSRs informativeness was carried out on a subset of 28 durum wheat cultivars. The discriminating ability of each primer was estimated both with Polymorphism Information Content (PIC) and with Resolving power (Rp). Rp resulted the best parameter for assessing the discriminatory power of SSR primers (r=0.94***; P <= 0.001). The marker Xwmc597 was able to discriminate all the 28 cultivars. Successively, 80 genotypes were analysed using three SSR markers with the higher Rp value. Two SSRs were able to distinguish all the 80 genotypes. Particularly, Xwmc597 was able to distinguish 69/80 genotypes while Xwmc415 identified the other cultivars. An identification key was obtained combining the data of these two markers.