Naked barley is widely planted in QinghaiTibet Plateau in China and is essential for the daily life of Tibetans in those regions. In this study, the genetic diversity of 64 cultivated naked barley accessions from Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China was analyzed using 30 mapped SSRs linked with the important traits of barley improvement. A total of 132 alleles were identified at 22 polymorphic SSR loci, with the number of each locus ranging from 2 to 15, the polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranging from 0.16 to 0.91, and with an average of 0.65. Of the selected SSRs, 13 SSR markers with high PIC value were highly efficient for the genetic analysis of Chinese barley. The accessions were divided into five main groups by cluster analysis and could be differentiated from each other. The genetic diversity in the Tibet accessions was slightly higher than in the Sichuan accessions. It is found that there were specific genes linked with the collecting sites. These results indicate the cultivated naked barley from Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China are highly polymorphic and could be considered as an important resource bank for cultivated naked barley breeding in the future.

BACKGROUND: Heterosis is a phenomenon that first-generation offspring perform better than their parents. Conventional breeding methods have their shortcomings. It would be optimal to construct inducible male sterile plants.

ABSTRACT. One of the most important uses of DNA markers is cultivar identification. However, no DNA fingerprint analysis strategy is available for making DNA markers helpful in practical plant cultivar identification, especially for the identification of a large number of cultivars. We developed a manual cultivar identification diagram strategy for efficient identification of plant cultivars, from which a cultivar identification diagram (CID) of genotyped plant individuals can be constructed manually. This CID could be used as a reference for quick identification of plant cultivars of interest. We used 11-mer RAPD primers to amplify DNA samples of 32 ornamental peach genotypes; all the cultivars were well distinguished by fingerprints from 6 primers. The utility of this CID was verified by identification of three randomly chosen groups of cultivars among the 32 ones that we selected. This CID generated will be useful for the identification of commercially important ornamental peach cultivars.