Genetic diversity analysis of oat (Avena sativa L.) germplasm revealed by agro-morphological and SSR markers

The present investigation was undertaken to assess the extent of genetic variability and diversity among different oat genotypes using agro-morphological and molecular markers. Data were recorded on agro-morphological, quality traits and reaction to powdery mildew resistance on 57 oat genotypes. Genetic diversity among different genotypes was studied based on morphological traits using Mahalanobis D2-statistic, principal component analysis (PCA) and SSR markers. Phenotypic coefficient of variance (PCV), genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV) and heritability was found high for several economically important yield-related traits. Based on D2-statistic, all the genotypes were grouped into eight clusters. Consequently, SSR analysis grouped the genotypes into two main clusters which were further divided into two sub-clusters. The selected panel of forty-seven SSR primers was able to identify a total of 171 alleles. Polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 0.30 to 0.68 with an average value of 0.502. Present findings demonstrated that overall, there were sufficient variability in the breeding materials indicating that selection would be effective in future hybridization programme and the diverse genotypes could be used as parents to generate transgressive segregants.