Transferability of sorghum microsatellite markers to bamboo and detection of polymorphic markers

The use of molecular markers for the characterization and evaluation of plant genetic resources has become a useful approach in plant genetic research. Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) are among the markers that are widely used in genetic diversity and parental analysis owing to their co-dominant nature, high reproducibility, abundance in the genome and transferability across species or genera. The development of these markers for a species might be costly and time consuming. Hence, screening existing markers through transferability test from closely related species or family is resource conscious. In this study, the transferability of 90 polymorphic SSR markers of sorghum to bamboo was tested and polymorphic analysis of transferable markers were performed. Nearly 62% of the tested SSRs successfully recorded amplification in at least one bamboo species of which 55% were polymorphic. These polymorphic markers detected a total of 147 alleles at an average rate of 4.7 alleles per marker. The abundant alleles account 20.4% while the common and rare alleles share 39.6 and 40 %, respectively. The result showed a relatively low degree of polymorphic information content (PIC) averaging 0.29. The gene diversity index (He) ranged from 0.21 to 0.49 with a mean of 0.37. The cluster analysis based on the polymorphic markers surfaced most of the species in accordance with their geographic origin. The complementarity of the weighted neighbour joining tree and coordinate analysis implies the representative nature of the transferred markers for the diversity analysis of bamboo species.