Title: Transcriptome data mining to develop EST-SSRs for genetic diversity assessment in Moringa oliefera

Biography:

Poornima Narayana has her expertise in plant genomics and marker development. Genome sequencing of crop plants has opened plethora of opportunities to study the genome structure and genetic diversity of these crop plants using molecular markers developed using on sequencing databases. The vast genome sequences need to be annotated to give a meaning to the genetic codes and this has been the goal of her to make the sequencing projects meaningful.  

Abstract

Moringa is one of the 13 diverse species present in the genus of tropical plant family Moringaceae. It has been a wonder crop with many beneficial compounds present in it. The leaves of Moringa are a very rich source of iron and the pods are said to be rich in fiber. A total of 48 polymorphic expressed sequence tag based microsatellite markers (EST-SSRs) were mined from transcriptome data of different parts of Moringa plant. A set of 32 genotypes selected from the germplasm have been assessed using the EST-SSRs thus designed. Of the different types of SSRs, we have 38% mononucleotide repeat motifs followed by 21% di-nucleotide repeats. The trinucleotide repeat like [(ATC/TGA/TCT/GAA)] were also found along with multinucleotide compound repeats. The mean expected heterozygosity (HE) ranged from 0.605 to 0.958 and observed heterozygosity (HO) ranged from 0.938 to 1.00 and PIC value ranged from 0.511 to 0.94. The diversity analysis using the EST-SSR data clustered the Moringa accessions into three clusters. These developed EST-SSRs can be useful in future population genetics analysis and breeding programs in Moringa species.