Abstract

The study was carried out to assess genetic diversity among forty-one sorghum accessions obtained from Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (SARI), Nyankpala, Northern Region of Ghana and the germplasm collection of Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Cape Coast. Genetic diversity and relationship among the forty-one accessions were evaluated using 22 microsatellite primers. The 22 markers generated 92 alleles, with a mean of 4.2, indicating an average range of diversity. The average polymorphic information content (PIC) was 0.44, indicating that the microsatellites were informative. The cluster analysis grouped the 41 cultivars into seven distinct clusters. The most genetically distinct genotypes were Edipipii, Jibare and Belkozia, which did not cluster with any other line. The similarity between the sorghum accessions ranged from 77 to 100%. Observed heterozygosity ranged from 0 to 0.17 with an average of 0.03 per locus. Results of this study indicated that the landraces were related, and were probably exchanged between farmers in the collection regions, with some duplication found in the material, indicating that there must have been a common source of material somewhere in the history of the breeding programmes. Nonetheless, the Edipipii, Jibare and Belkozia could be exploited in breeding programmes to transfer desirable traits into elite Ghanaian sorghum cultivars.

Key words: Sorghum, simple sequence repeats (SSRs), genetic diversity, polymorphic information content (PIC).