Allelic diversity of 22 sampoerna agro’s oil palm pisifera based on microsatellite markers

Abstract

Knowledge on genetic distances and relationships among breeding materials are important in plant breeding and have significant impact on crop improvement. Sampoerna Agro (SA) has established oil palm germplasm collections consisted of 22 pisifera populations originated from various regions. Microsatellites markers are highly reliable; inherited in co-dominant fashion; therefore, they are able to distinguish heterozygous to homozygous individual; easy to score and rapidly produced using PCR. In this experiment, allelic diversity among SA’s pisifera collection (85 palms from the total populations) were investigated using SSR marker (20 SSR loci). Results of the investigations indicated the presence of at least 163 alleles in the SA’s pisifera collection evaluated. Mean number of alleles per locus was 8.2 while mean of polymorphic information content (PIC) of the SSR marker analyzed was 67 %. Observed mean of heterozygosity was 0.4 while expected mean of heterozygosity was 0,7. Results of genetic dissimilarity coefficient calculation and dendogram construction using DARwin 5.05 indicated that the SA’s pisifera populations were clustered into four groups. Some accessions of Yangambi origin formed group I; some other Yangambi and Ekona origin clustered into group II; Ghana, LaMé, Dami, and the rest of Nigeria origin clustered into group III, and a number of Avros origin were in Group IV, respectively. Implication of the observed allelic diversity to the SA’s oil palm breeding program will be discussed in detail.