Assessment of genetic diversity among Chinese upland cottons with Fusarium and/or Verticillium wilts resistance by AFLP and SSR markers

Abstract

Genetic diversity among 95 Chinese upland cottons with Fusarium and/or Verticillium wilts resistance was estimated using Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) and Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) markers. Twenty EcoRI-MseI AFLP and 19 SSR primers with polymorphism were selected to perform the fingerprinting. The results showed that 20 AFLP primer pairs produced a total of 1 480 major bands among 95 genotypes, and 214 were polymorphic bands. The number of total bands per primer pair ranged from 47 to 109, with an average of 74.0. The polymorphism information content (PIC) values for the 20 primer pairs varied from 0.01 (E-ACT/M-CAT) to 0.24 (E-ACA/M-CTA), and the average value was 0.09. Nineteen SSR primers generated 89 DNA bands, of which 61 were polymorphic. The total number of alleles per locus varied from 3 to 8, with an average of 4.7. The average PIC value for the SSR amplification products was 0.69. Genetic similarity estimates for the entire data set ranged from 0.978 to 0.998 based on AFLP and SSR bands. It was proved that the close genetic relationship and narrow genetic diversity existed in the tested cultivars. The clustering patterns could not be correlated to the geographic origin, the pedigree and common parentage of the cultivars.