Kabita Sethi , Swapan Kumar Tripathy , Prabhu Charan Lenka , Priyadarshini Mohanty

1. Department of Fruit Science and Horticulture Technology, College of Agriculture, OUAT, Bhubaneswar, India
2. Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, College of Agriculture, OUAT, Bhubaneswar, India
3. Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, College of Agriculture, OUAT, Bhubaneswar India
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Horticulture, 2016, Vol. 6, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/ijh.2016.06.0002
Received: 18 Dec., 2015    Accepted: 17 Feb., 2016    Published: 15 Mar., 2016

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sethi K., Lenka P.C., Tripathy S.K., and Mohanty P., 2016, Assessment of molecular genetic diversity and identification of elite cashew hybrids, International Journal of Horticulture, 6(2): 1-10 (doi: 10.5376/ijh.2016.06.0002)

Genetic diversity among 20 cashew hybrids and their eight parents were assessed using 15 RAPD primers which resulted 1742 alleles with an average of 62.21 alleles per genotype. RAPD profiles revealed 94 polymorphic bands out of total 107 scorable bands resulting 87.85% polymorphism. On an average 7.66 bands were produced with a range of 4-15 amplicons per primer. The maximum number (14) of polymorphic bands (210 to 3250 bp) was produced by primer OU-34 with high polymorphic information content (PIC) and resolving power (Rp) values. Cashew hybrids H 6 and D 19 maintained very high level of average genetic dissimilarity with rest of the test genotypes. The above hybrids comprising the most divergent genetic group (Cluster-I) had shown significantly above average productivity and these could enrich the cashew gene pool for further genetic improvement for nut quality and yield per se. Besides, the genotype-specific bands identified in the present study are useful for identification of cashew genotypes.

RAPD profiling; Agronomic traits; Genetic diversity; Varietal identification; Cashew hybrids