Cross-species transferability of soybean SSR markers to yam bean (Pachyrhizus erosus L.): an underutilized crop for diversity analysis

Yam bean (Pachyrhizus erosus L.) is an underutilized tuber crop that has recently gained popularity because of its enormous advantages in terms of nutrition and health. To date, there are no such potential molecular and genomic tools are available for the improvement of the yam bean crop that could help in studying genetic diversity or to identify and selecting elite cultivars for their conservation. The present study used 67 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers from soybean crops and checked their transferability in the 140 accessions of the yam bean, which identified 15 polymorphic novel SSR markers that showed cross-species transferability. These SSR markers show a diversity dissimilarity percentage of 0.42 among all accession and polymorphic information content ranging from 0.03 to 0.84 with a mean of 0.36. Among the 140 accessions of yam bean, the SSR markers showed major allele frequency varying from 0.22 to 0.99 with an average of 0.68. The highest allele frequency, 0.99, was observed in SSR marker GMES0011. The population structure K-3 was identified based on the values of delta K and maximum likelihood (K) among the population of the yam bean. The (Analysis of Molecular Variance) AMOVA analysis identified genetic variance obtained among the population and within the population was 21% and 79%, respectively. These 15 soybean SSR markers successfully differentiated the yam bean accessions into three groups. The present finding could be used to design a breeding strategy for the yam bean, to discover donor parents with untapped genetic potential for improvement, and promote crop preservation.