<p>Protein is an important part of our diet and legumes viz., pigeonpea, chickpea, groundnut, cowpea, blackgram, greengram, etc are very rich source of protein. Among them, pigeonpea consists of about 20 to 22% of seed protein. Minicore collection set is consisted of approximately 10 % of core collection and 1% of entire collection with lot of diversity present in it. Nitrogen content of pigeonpea minicore collection set was estimated using Micro-Kjeldhal method and was ranged from 9.82 to 21.45 %. Based on per cent seed protein, twelve accessions of high and twelve accessions of low seed protein were selected for molecular characterization using 23 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The PowerMarker result depicted that, among twenty three amplified markers, twenty markers generated polymorphism with mean polymorphic information content (PIC), major allele frequency (MAF) and genetic diversity of 0.479, 0.589 and 0.525 respectively. Based on molecular characterization, the dendrogram was constructed using DARwin 5.0 software distinguished the selected accessions of both high and low seed protein separately into different clusters showing diversity The results illustrate the potential of marker systems to distinguish the content of seed protein in pulses crop at genus level. Use of these markers also offers an efficient system for the assessment of genetic diversity within minicore set of pigeonpea.</p>


<p>Genetic diversity of selected accessions for seed protein among&nbsp;pigeonpea minicore collection</p>


<div style="text-align: justify;">The present investigation was carried out using 191genotypes as mini core collections of pigeonpea along with 5 check varieties to know the genetic diversity at molecular level. Significant variation was observed by the way of analysis of variance for nine characters viz., days to 50 % flowering, days to maturity, plant height, number of branches per plant, pod bearing length, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per pod, seed yield per plant and hundred seed weight. Molecular diversity using 18 polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers divided genotypes into 15 clusters, of which ICP-11059 and AK-101 were solitary, indicating their distinctiveness among all genotypes. Similarly, BSMR-533, JKM-7, RVK-285, ICP-1126, ICP-348, ICP-6859 and ICP-7869 were found distinct among the genotypes. Geographical origin based diversity separated Indian and non Indian genotypes. The Un weighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) based dendrogram indicated distinctiveness of ICP-13633 and Bennur local, as they formed solitary cluster. The SSR marker CcM 602, as it could differentiate 4 genotypes at different base pair size can be used for identification and finger printing of genotypes.</div>

Genetic diversity of selected accessions for seed protein among pigeonpea minicore collection

Molecular dissection of genetic diversity in pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L) Millsp.] minicore collection