Characterization of Cultivated and Wild Genotypes of Brinjal (Solanum melongena L.) and Confirmation of Hybridity using Microsatellite Markers

Characterization of Cultivated and Wild Genotypes of Brinjal (Solanum melongena L.) and Confirmation of Hybridity using Microsatellite Markers

Knowledge of brinjal genome organization is rather limited compared to other solanaceous crops, especially tomato and potato. There is a strong brinjal breeding programme at Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) since its inception which led to release of several varieties and hybrids in this crop. In the present investigation, the diversity of twenty genotypes of brinjal representing nine open pollinated varieties, four hybrids, seven parents of hybrids (one parent common for two hybrids) and three wild relatives namely S. integrifolium, S. incanum and S. aethiopicum has been analyzed using 47 microsatellite loci distributed uniformly throughout the genome. These 47 simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci amplified a total of 135 alleles among the 23 genotypes with one to seven alleles per loci. The average number of alleles per loci was found to be 2.87. The highest polymorphism information content (PIC value) was observed to be 0.75 for the marker emf11F24 located on linkage group 11. Our study also utilized the SSR marker technique for confirming the hybridity of four IARI brinjal hybrids. Four markers viz. emg11104, eme08D09, ecm009, and emf11F24 confirmed the hybridity of three hybrids namely, PH-5, PH-6 and DBHL-20.