Molecular Characterization of Wheat Germplasm Using Microsatellite Marker for Drought Tolerance

Abstract

Drought stress has been found to be one of the major causes of reduced crop yield and great efforts have been made to breed drought tolerant crop varieties. Eighteen elite wheat genotypes including popUlar cultivars of India were taken into consideration f9r morpho-physiological and molecular characterization using drought specific SSR markers. Plant height, .spike length, spikelets per spike and test weight decreased in drought conditions in compare to irrigated (control) plants, while physiological traits Viz. proline and chlorophyll contents. In proline test only two genotypes respond well to drought and increased proline content when applied drought. Maximum average of chlorophyll content was reported in genotypes CHHOTILERMA (45.4 %), Hl-8498 (45.2%) & DWR-162 (44.0%) under stressed conditions and these three genotypes showed increased amount of chlorophyll contents in compare to control (irrigated/unstressed) conditions. A total of five drought related SSR markers were used across eighteen elite wheat genotypes for their characterization an9 discrimination. All five markers gave polymorphism among all wheat genotypes with PIC value ranges from 0.52 to 0.66. Primer Xgwm296 showed the lowest PIC value (0.52), while maximum PIC value showed by primer Xgwm566 (0.66). The pair wise genetic dissimilarity indices indicated that the highest genetic dissimilarity between genotype C-306 and rest were in a different cluster which showed relatively less dissimilarity