“…SSRs are highly useful in assessing diversity among closely related rice cultivars (Singh et al, 2013;Yadav et al, 2013) as they provide better resolvability, are multi-allelic, provide genomewide coverage, are highly reproducible, are easy to score, and are cost-effective (Akagi et al, 1997;Singh and Singh, 2015). There are several studies that used SSR markers for finding the genetic structure of the rice germplasm, as one of the most widely used molecular markers for genetic diversity studies (Nachimuthu et al, 2015;Singh et al, 2016;Aljumaili et al, 2018;Islam et al, 2018a,b;Pathaichindachote et al, 2019;Suvi et al, 2019;Verma et al, 2019). Further, SSR markers are also proven to be efficient in delineating major genetic groups of rice, namely, indica, temperate japonica, tropical japonica, aus, and aromatic (Roy et al, 2015(Roy et al, , 2016Wang et al, 2014).…”