Genetic Diversity of Egyptian Barley Cultivars for Water Stress using SSR Markers

Abstract

Abiotic stresses in particular water stress which was considered important stress that affecting all crops in all the world and Egypt. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the performance of 15 Egyptian barley cultivars and find out the genetic diversity of these cultivars for water stress tolerance using simple sequence repeats (SSR) during two consecutive seasons to detect their tolerance to water stress. Results revealed that the Egyptian barley Giza 126, Giza 131 and Giza 2000 were considered as tolerant cultivars, which they exhibited the highest mean values for all studied morphological and physiological traits. Twenty alleles were produced as a result of fingerprinting ten SSR primers ranging from one to four alleles per locus with a mean value of 2.0 alleles per locus .The PIC (Polymorphism Information Content) value of each SSR marker ranged from 0.23 (HvM67) to 0.58 (EBmac 624) with an average value of 0.227. Un-weighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic (UPGMA) cluster analysis of the similarity data grouped all the fifteen studied Egyptian cultivars into two major groups divided according to their response to water stress tolerance; first group include all the water stress tolerant cultivars and moderately tolerant in two closely related clusters, while all the sensitive genotypes and moderate cultivars in the other group were closely related in two clusters. These results proposed that SSR markers are professional and detective tool for assessment of genetic diversity and relatedness as well as distinguishing the Egyptian barley cultivars for water stress tolerance to use them in breeding program.