Identification and classification of aromatic rices based on DNA fingerprinting

Aromatic rices are preferred by the consumers all over the world due to its flavour and palatability. Although a large number of these collections are available, little systematic analysis of genetic diversity has been carried out. With the objective of identification and classification of aromatic rice genotypes, RAPD profiling was employed using 58 random decamer primers. Most of these primers (96.5%) detected polymorphism among the genotypes. Of the 465 amplified bands, 314 were polymorphic. Cluster analysis based on Jaccard's similarity coefficient using UPGMA grouped all the traditional tall, photosensitive, low yielding, long grained ‘basmati’ aromatics together. The short grained aromatic cultivars, formed a different cluster with high level of average similarity among themselves. The dendrogram based on 58 primers was highly similar to that based on 10 and 15 primers with matrix correlation (r) of 0.88 and 0.91, respectively. This suggested that a set of 10 primers can be employed for an initial assessment of genetic diversity in a large number of collections. All the rice genotypes included in the study could be distinguished from each other at the level of 19 to 186 polymorphic bands between individuals in pair wise comparison over all the 58 primers. Probability of identical profiles by chance suggested that about 10⁴¹ genotypes can be unambiguously differentiated by RAPD fingerprints obtained by 58 primers. A diagrammatic mode of presentation of DNA fingerprints of the aromatic rices based on 10 of the informative primers was developed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.