ABSTRACT. The cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) is an important crop grown worldwide. In this study, the genetic diversity of 42 cucumber cultivars in China was analyzed using 51 pairs of simple sequence repeat (SSR) primers. These primers identified 129 polymorphic loci, 95.6% of which were polymorphic. The mean effective number of alleles, mean Nei's gene diversity, and mean Shannon's information index were 0.36, 0.16, and 0.21, respectively. A cluster analysis demonstrated that the 42 cultivars could be divided into three groups, a result that was largely consistent with those of a principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA indicated that the three groups displayed significant variation in fruit traits. The cultivars of group 1 tended to have longer fruits (>30 cm), longer fruit ends (>4 cm), larger fruit diameters (>5 cm), a sharp strigose fruit spine, and the same fruit end shape. The basal color of the fruit in group 2 was dark green. Group 3 cultivars have no wax or mottling on the fruit surface. Our study 19029 Genetic diversity in the cucumber ©FUNPEC-RP www.funpecrp.com.br Genetics and Molecular Research 14 (4): 19028-19039 (2015) demonstrates the value of our SSR primers for assessing genetic diversity in cucumber.

ABSTRACT. We investigated the genetic polymorphisms of three short tandem repeat (STR) loci, D18S53, D18S59, and D18S488, on chromosome 18 in fetuses from a Chinese Tianjin Han population. Sixty-four villus samples and 374 amniotic fluid samples were collected from fetuses. Quantitative fluorescence polymerase chain reaction was performed to amplify the STR loci, followed by scanned electrophoresis and quantitative analysis of the fluorescence signals. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) analysis was performed based on the genotype distributions of the STR loci to obtain the following population genetic data: genotype frequency, heterozygosity of observation (H O ), polymorphism information content (PIC), probability of discrimination power (PD), and probability of exclusion (PE). We detected 15, 13, and 15 alleles of D18S53, D18S59, and D18S488, respectively. The genotype frequencies were found to be in line with HWE. The