Genetic diversity analysis of 26 rice varieties; 7 from Thailand, 14 from Laos and 5 from Yunnan, China, was conducted using DNA markers specific to starch synthesis related genes (SSRGs). Screening of 31 markers from 17 SSRGs showed 16 polymorphic makers (51.62%). All polymorphic markers contain 2 alleles, which fragment size ranges from 101-700 bp. The dendrogram was constructed based on Jaccard’s similarity coefficient using the marker data for all the rice genotypes following unweighted pair group method analysis. Examined rice varieties were divided into two major groups with a similarity coefficient of 0.68 correlated to their geographic distributions. The genetic variation of rice varieties between different countries was higher than genetic variation of rice varieties within country. Rice varieties from Laos seem to have close relationship with rice varieties from Yunnan, China. Our results showed that the SSRGs can be used as DNA makers to evaluate the genetic diversity in rice and the data generated from this study could be used in the parental selection in rice breeding program.
Keywords
rice; starch; starch synthesis related genes (SSRGs); genetic variation; DNA marker