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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]