Molecular discrimination of maize CMS type and genetic relationship using RAMs markers

Abstract

Molecular characterization of CMS is an environmentally-independent tool and represents an alternative way to consider genetic variation within and between the different maize populations. The current study which consisted of six cms lines of maize in the 8th generation (S8) revealed that all of these lines were C-type. The adopted six specific markers (forward and reverse) in detecting the three cms types produced a fragment with a molecular size of ~350 bp. The used RAMs markers (UBC-810, UBC-812, UBC-821, UBC-848, UBC-854 and UBC-855) produced a total of 36 fragments across the lines genomes, 25 out of them were polymorphic scoring a polymorphism percentage of 69.4%. The PIC values indicated that UBC-821 was the most discriminative primer with a PIC value of 0.40 compared to UBC-854, and UBC-855 primers which had the humble capability to distinguish between the studied inbreds with a PIC value of 0.33. The results of cluster analysis based on the molecular discrimination confirmed that A1 has the lowest values of genetic similarity, hence it was the most genetically divergent against the other cms inbred lines, especially A6 (0.42). On the other hand, A2 and A3 lines found to be genetically related by scoring the maximum genetic similarity (0.92). Molecular investigations have several advantages over the traditional methods and will be helpful in the real evaluation of any genotype.