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Plant Science Today (PST)

Research Articles

Vol. 12 No. 3 (2025)

Validation of SSR markers linked to heat tolerance in bread wheat genotypes

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14719/pst.7054
Submitted
3 January 2025
Published
07-07-2025 — Updated on 14-07-2025
Versions

Abstract

Parental selection and breeding rely on the existence of genetic diversity and relationships present in germplasms. The objective of this study was to assess the molecular divergence for terminal heat stress tolerance in twenty wheat genotypes, utilizing 25 SSR markers associated with heat tolerance, which are linked to the trait of interest across various chromosomes. For molecular diversity assessment, fourteen polymorphic SSR markers, out of the twenty-five, amplified a total of 33 alleles, which were distributed across nine chromosomes. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 2 to 3, with an average of 2.36 alleles per locus. Polymorphism information content (PIC), resolving power (Rp), effective multiplex ratio (EMR) and marker index (MI) values were high for markers viz., Xwmc603, Xwmc161 and Xgwm577, indicating that they had the most discriminatory power. Based on Jaccard's similarity coefficient, the genetic similarity among the 20 wheat genotypes ranged from 0.36 to 0.88. The dendrogram generated from UPGMA cluster analysis revealed two primary clusters: cluster I, which comprised three genotypes and cluster II, which included seventeen genotypes. Genotypes GS/2019- 20/6046, HPYT-2019-20/416 and GS/2019 20/5042 fall in cluster I and the remaining seventeen genotypes are included in cluster II, with similarity coefficient values ranging from 0.70 to 0.79 and 0.36 to 0.88, respectively. The current study demonstrated that there is enough
variation present among the genotypes at the molecular level and the findings would help to make use of diverse genotypes as parents in future hybridizing programs to improve terminal heat tolerance.

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