Evaluation of Molecular Diversity of Rice Varieties in Central and West Asia Using Microsatellite Markers

Background and aim: rice is the most important food source for more than half of the world's population. one of the most important applications of molecular markers in plant breeding is to evaluate the potential of hereditary stocks that can provide valuable genotypes for breeding appropriate crosses. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the genetic diversity within a diverse collection of rice (oryza sativa l.) accessions.methods: in this study, 60 microsatellite markers were used in 63 rice genotypes of central and west asia to group rice cultivars.results: based on data from 60 markers, it was observed that a total of 252 polymorphic alleles were amplified with an average of 4.2 alleles per primer. the lowest number of alleles belonged to the rm490 marker with 2 alleles and the highest number was belonged to the rm225 marker with 8 alleles, rm424 and rm246 markers with 7 alleles. the mean number of effective alleles was 3.78 which rm490 and rm5423 markers had the lowest and the rm225 and rm246 markers had the highest value for this index. gene diversity and amount of polymorphic information content showed that rm23 and rm212 markers had the highest value and rm3 marker had the lowest value for these two indices. classification of genotypes was performed by cluster analysis using past software. genotypes were classified into 5 clusters using dice similarity coefficient and upgma method.conclusion: based on the results of cluster analysis and genetic distances, genotypes of iran, afghanistan and azerbaijan can be used for hybrid production in order to increase grain yield and quality.