Molecular characterization of accessions from a traditional rice cultivar, Suwandel conserved at plant genetic resources centre, Sri Lanka

Suwandel is one of the most important traditional rice cultivars in Sri Lanka. The present study was conducted to identify the molecular differences and to determine duplicates among the Suwandel rice accessions conserved at Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC). A total of 20 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were used across 11 Suwandel rice accessions. Out of these 20 SSR loci 18 loci showed polymorphism. A total of 47 alleles were detected and the number of alleles per locus ranged from 1-4 with an average of 2 alleles. The frequency of the most common allele at each locus ranged from 45 to 100% with an average of 67%. Genetic diversity among 20 loci ranged from 0.00 to 0.67 with an average of 0.42. Polymorphic information content ranged from 0.00 to 0.62 with an average of 0.35. A phylogenetic tree showed three distinct main clusters with two sub clusters in the cluster three. The highest genetic similarity was obtained between AC 12827 and C 2013-12- 778 (91%) which can be identified as closely related Suwandel rice accessions. The lowest similarity was recorded between AC 4197 and AC 4366 (27%). According to the similarity matrix and phylogenetic tree, there were no duplicates among the accessions