Genetic diversity of grape germplasm as revealed by microsatellite (SSR) markers

Abstract

In this work, cluster analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) were used to study the genetic diversity and relationships among 49 grape germplasm accessions analyzed with 19 simple sequence repeat (SSR) primer pairs. In total, 139 polymorphic loci were detected among these accessions with an average of 7.32 polymorphic loci per SSR primer pair. The average values for the effective number of alleles, Nei’s gene diversity, and Shannon’s information index were 1.5605, 0.3352 and 0.5064, respectively. The cluster analysis showed that the 49 accessions could be divided into five groups and an outgroup. The results of the PCA were nearly consistent with those of unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA) clustering analysis. These results will be useful for the exploitation of grape germplasm in basic and applied research.

 Key words: Vitis vinifera L., simple sequence repeat (SSR), genetic diversity, principal component analysis. 

 Abbreviation: PCA, principal component analysis; SSR, simple sequence repeat; UPGMA, unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages