Microsatellite Markers based Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) Accessions

Lentil is the highly nutritious cool season pulse crop that is the boom for mitigation of malnutrition and maintenance of global food security. Genetic variation and selection is the basis for any crop improvement programme. To explore the pattern of genetic diversity among lentil accessions for salt stress, microsatellite markers (SSR) were used. Development of long lasting stable cultivar require the utilization of diverse germplasm. This study was conducted at ICAR-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, Karnal by utilizing 100 lentil accessions. In this study 12 SSR (simple sequence repeat) markers were used. Minor allele frequency (MAF) ranged from 0.07 to 0.49 with mean value of 0.27. Genetic diversity (GD) for SSRs ranged from 0.11 to 0.50. The polymorphic information content (PIC) which ranged from 0 to 1 is the measure of the degree of polymorphism that ranged from 0.12 to 0.38 in present study. Three sub-groups based on population structure analysis, denoted as the red, green and blue clusters, encompassed of 35, 48 and 17 lentil accessions, respectively. UPGMA-based phylogenetic tree was constructed also congregated all genotypes into three main clusters. The information generated in our study may have great implications in molecular characterization, fingerprinting and documentation of accessions in the lentil improvement programme.