Determination of genetic variation of drought tolerant chickpea genotypes using SSR and CAPS markers

Chickpea is the second most important pulses in arid and semi-arid regions of the world. This product is often cultivated as rainfed crop, so drought stress causing 50% yield loss. In this research, 11 SSR and 6 CAPS primer pairs were used to evaluate genetic variation among 9 chickpea candidate genotypes for drought tolerant and 2 common sensitive cultivars. Ten effective SSRs were again evaluated in a population containing random genotypes for cold-tolerance. SRR band analysis in final experiment generated 40 alleles, of which 37 were polymorphic. The average number of polymorphic alleles for each gene site was 3.9 with the range of 2-9 alleles. The polymorphic information content (PIC) varied from 0.21 to 0.85. The cluster analysis, based on the UPGMA algorithm and Jaccard's similarity coefficient, splited the genotypes into nine distinct groups including four groups of drought tolerant genotypes, two relatively drought tolerant groups and other three groups belonging to the random population. The polymorphism results of the SSR and CAPS markers indicated that the two genotypes MCC544 and MCC392 were more distinctive from other drought tolerant genotypes. MCC537 and MCC696 were also highly related in a separate group, and the MCC80 was allocated in average position among tolerant genotypes. MCC427 and a common cultivar MCC358 were classified into one group as well as the international cultivar MCC252 with MCC302 genotypes. The results indicated the lack of a genetic similarity between selected population of drought tolerant candidates and cold tolerant candidates. This could indicate that there might be no pleiotropic effect among the genes involved in these stresses, which can be important for breeding purposes of this crop.