ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC DIVERSITY AND POPULATION GENETIC STRUCTURE AMONG THE ACCESSIONS OF JEERA (Nigella sativa L.), FROM AFGHANISTAN AND INDIA USING MORPHOLOGICAL, MOLECULAR AND BIOCHEMICAL TRAITS
Loading...
Date
2017-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Horticultural Sciences, Bagalkot. (College of Horticulture, Bengaluru).
Abstract
Black cumin (N. sativa L.) is a crop of great medicinal value, but poorly studied and less tried for genetic improvement. Assessment of the genetic diversity is therefore of crucial importance for its genetic improvement. The present study was undertaken to assess the genetic diversity of the 37 accessions collected from Afghanistan and India. The accessions were sown during late Rabi 2014 and early Rabi 2015 and evaluated for 11 traits including yield and seed oil content. Black cumin accessions showed significant differences for all the characters including total yield and oil percentage during 2014. During 2015 the accessions did differ significantly for most characters except plant height, number of locules per capsule and seeds per capsule. PCA analysis based on the Morphological traits revealed that there is broad-scale geographic differentiation of the populations of N sativa and populations seem to be mixing well at a small geographic scale either because of human mediated commercial exploitation or because of natural out-crossing. RAPD primers were used for molecular diversity analysis of 12 accessions chosen to represent the diversity at phenotypic level. The number of bands produced by each primer ranged from 1 to 11. The highest number of loci were amplified in I.15 and BH.2 primers and the lowest in I.18; the gene diversity observed ranged from 0.00 in primer I.14 to 0.42 in primer I.1 with a mean gene diversity of 0.2. The Polymorphic information contents (PIC) of the 11 RAPD primers used varied between 0.00 and 0.35. Average PIC was 0.22. The genotypes from Afghanistan and India had similar similarity index values within each group (or country) than between them suggesting that short geographical isolation has low influence on the genetic diversity of the genotypes.