Thousands of hypervariable regions called microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSR), present in plant and animal genomes, are characterized by two to four pairs of bases in tandem repeats. These loci can be amplified through Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) using specific primers (18-20 pb long), which recognize unique flanking sequences of the hypervariable regions. Abundant variability present within these loci together with loci specificity and its codominant nature makes this kind of marker a powerful tool for wheat research. In this study the microsatellite markers were evaluated as a potential tool for finger printing of the wheat cultivars and for the studies on genetic variability.||Microsatellites, located at different chromosomes, were used to analyze a set of 105 bread wheat varieties from Argentina. Variability for each microsatellite locus was measured using the Polymorphism Information Content (PIC). PIC values for the different loci varied between 0.40 and 0.84. These values were compared with those obtained through RFLP in the same set of varieties, that reached an average value of 0.46 for the HMW-GS loci. These results suggest that microsatellite markers were an appropriate tool to discriminate this set of varieties.||Closely related varieties, that present high similarity coefficients, can be discriminated using selected microsatellites. Finally, a subset of microsatellites was used to construct an Identity Matrix for the registered bread wheat cultivars that will allow an unequivocal identification of each variety. The chromosome location, range in size, number of alleles and PIC of each microsatellite loci were parameters used to build the Identity Matrix mentioned above.

English

0105|AL-Wheat Program|AGRIS 0102

Jose Juan Caballero

CIMMYT Publications Collection