Emerging Genetic Diversity and Construction Fingerprint of Protein Content of Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) to Agro-Ecological Sustainability

The leaf vegetable quinoa ( Chenopodium quinoa Wild.) can be used as vegetables similar to spinach in the same family, providing important vitamins, proteins and minerals for human beings. In this study, in order to evaluate the genetic diversity among the leaf vegetable quinoa germplasm resources, and then select new leaf vegetable quinoa varieties with high quality and high yield, morphological markers and SRAP markers were used to analyze the genetic diversity of 20 leaf vegetable quinoa germplasm resources and core primer combinations were used to construct their fingerprints. The results showed that 20 quinoa lines could be divided into 6 groups when the distance between classes was 8 and the genetic similarity coefficient was 0.732, but there were differences in the classification of specific quinoa lines and subclasses, indicating that the genotype of morphological markers had little correlation with the loci detected by SRAP markers. Three quinoa lines were checked with specific SRAP primers. Using the primers Me1-Em1 and Me1-Em2, the fingerprints of 20 leaf vegetable quinoa lines were finally constructed. This study would provide a research basis for the selection of leaf vegetable quinoa germplasm resources, and it also provided foundation for the breeding, registration and promotion of new varieties in the next step for leaf vegetable quinoa. There were 7 lines with protein content between 3.0% and 5.5%, 5 lines between 2.0%, and 3.0%, 7 lines between 1.0% and 2.0%, and 1 line less than 1.0%. The average content of vitamin C was 17.36 mg/100 g, with the coefficient of variation 7.89%. The highest content of vitamin C in JQ-02261 was 44.32 mg/100 g, and the lowest in JQ-02213 was 6.21 mg/100 g.