Molecular characterization of oats (Avena sativa L.) diversity: Implications for dual-purpose breeding

Abstract

Oat (Avena sativa L.) is one of the world's healthiest and gluten-free grains that are packed with essential vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants. It is also one of the most important cereal fodder crops. The present study was conducted from 2016 to 2018 and morphological and molecular diversity was analyzed for dual-purpose oat based on ten fodder and eight grain traits among 96 oats accessions including four wild accessions (A. vavilioviana, Guiena oats, A. maroccana and A. sterilis) collected from various eco-geographical regions of India. Thirty-one out of one hundred seventy (18%) simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers detected polymorphism among the 96 oat accessions with average polymorphic information content (PIC) of 0.47. A total of 100 alleles were detected with an average of 3.2 alleles per primer. The molecular diversity analysis grouped all the 96 germplasm lines into two major clusters, ?A? and ?B?. The similarity coefficients ranged from 0.37 to 1. The genotypic pairs viz; UPO 276: SKO 315 (46%); SKO 314: OL-125 (46%); SKO 314: OS 363 (49%); SKO 314: UPO 032 (49%) exhibited least genetic similarity and these pairs can be potentially used as parents to conduct various mapping studies and further contributing to the oat breeding community. Moreover, 6 accessions (JHO-2001-1, JHO-99-2, OL 1635, SKO 27, UPO 093 and OS329) had been identified which were superior to OL-10 (best check in the northwest India) for fodder as well as grain yield. This study showed the opportunity of utilizing SSR markers with morphological characteristics to breed for dual purpose oats.