Indian Society of Genetics & Plant Breeding
Combating mineral deficiencies has been a major challenge
for agricultural scientists world over. Lack of calcium in
diets could be overcome through biofortifying food crops
especially cereals. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana) grains
are highly rich in calcium, therefore in the present study
this trait was explored using association study on a natural
population of finger millet. A total of 238 accessions of
finger millet were analysed using 85 simple sequence
repeats (SSR) markers. SSR profiles generated 160 alleles
and 20 primer pairs were polymorphic across the population
with 0.14 to 0.78 polymorphic information content. Grain
Calcium content (GCC) varied from 72 to 452 mg/100g seed.
Two accessions, GPHCPB45 (452.8 mg) IE 2957 (447 mg)
were found with highest GCC. Association analysis through
the general linear model in TASSEL software detected two
markers UGEP78 and UGEP60 in significant association (P
< 0.001) to calcium content. The molecular marker, UGEP60
can be a potential marker with phenotypic variance
amounting to 13.8%. However, the mixed linear model did
not detect any significant associations probably because
of low polymorphism within the finger millet collection
considered in this study. Identification of two accessions
with higher calcium content may be useful in finger millet
improvement.
Keywords: Association mapping, calcium-QTL, finger millet, population structure
Year: 2020
Volume: 80
Issue: 4
Article DOI: 10.31742/IJGPB.80.4.9
Print ISSN: 0019-5200
Online ISSN: 0975-6906
Shambhavi Yadav, Anil Kumar and Salej Sood info_circle
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