Assessment of genetic diversity in Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) using RAPD marker

José Alejandro Ruiz

Master's thesis

Abstract:

ABSTRACT Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L Moench) is one of the most important cereal crops and ranks fifth among cereals after wheat, rice, maize and barley for economic importance. Because the demand of food is increasing and also the competition for global water resources is becoming more intense in the twenty-first century, sorghum will increase in importance as a source of food, feed, fiber, and fuel; specially in the European continent where sorghum is little cultivated, mainly due to the lack of sorghum varieties well adapted to the agronomic conditions such photoperiod, cold and drought tolerance; for this reason the genetic diversity analysis, through molecular characterization, is an important requirement to begin a plant breeding program. In this sense, the present study is aimed to assess the genetic diversity of sorghum accession through Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA molecular marker (RAPD). The analysis was performed in 45 sorghum accessions obtained from the Gen Bank of the Crop Research Insitute, Prague. Genetic variability values were estimated, through the dissimilarity index using Dice coefficient, and dendogram constructed using DARwing software. Four out of fifteen of the primers evaluated were completly polimorphic (100%), 126 scorable bands were identified and 89% of them were polymorphic, the bands ranged from 200 to 2000 bp. The dendogram grouped the accession into six clusters. The results indicate the existance of high genetic diversity with dissimilarity values up to 0.2809 among the evaluated accessions, even if the accessions were collected in the same country, or by the contrary, lower genetic diversity among accessions collected in different countries. It may be due to the existence of five ancient races of sorghum, from which most of the wild and cultivated species known nowadays were originated. Mainly, the migration of people from the origin centre of sorghum, located in Ethiopia and Sudan, explain the spread of the genetic material out of Africa. The information generated by this study should be useful for a better understanding of the genetic diversity from the sorghum germplasm stored in the Czech gene bank for future plant breeding program.

Keywords

Sorghum bicolor, Genetic diversity, DNA, RAPD

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 22. 4. 2016

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: doc. Dr. Ing. Eloy Fernández Cusimamani

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences

Master programme / field:
Tropical Agriculture / Tropical Crop Management and Ecology