Abstract

Mulberry (Morus L.) is essential for sericulture industry as the primary source of food for silkworm Bombyx mori L. In India, long tradition of practising sericulture includes the use of a large number of indigenous cultivars. Since knowledge on genetic divergence of these cultivars/varieties is imperative for conservation and gainful utilization, simple sequence repeat (SSR) profiling was employed to assess genetic relatedness among 17 mulberry genotypes maintained in the Germplasm Bank of Temperate Sericulture Institute, SKUAST Kashmir, Mirgund. Six SSR primers were utilised which generates 17 alleles among the genotypes. The polymorphism information content (PIC) value varied from 0.260 (MulSTR3) to 0.623 (MulSTR4), with an average of 0.438 per locus. The highest similarity value of 0.92 was observed between Lemoncina and Kanva-2, as compared to the lowest similarity coefficient of 0.15 was between SKM-48 and Chinese white. Clustering of the genotypes was done with unweight pair group method using arithmetic average (UPGMA) which generates five clusters. Cluster-2 contained maximum (six) genotypes.

Key words: Clustering, genetic relatedness, mulberry, SSR.