Genetic diversity of Ghanaian pearl millet landraces

One Hundred and fifty-one pearl millet accessions collected from their production zones of Upper East, Upper West and Northern Regions were genotyped using Thirty-Six (36) Pearl millet SSR markers (loci) in 20111. This study used the Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) markers since these have demonstrated to be very informative in studying relationships in closely related plant species as well as readily detecting co-dominant inheritance and exhibiting a high level of polymorphism per loci. The results revealed a total of 316 alleles for all accessions using the 36 markers. A maximum of 20 alleles were observed by loci Xpsmp2270 and Xpsmp2068, and a minimum of 3 alleles were revealed by loci XPsmp2246 and Xpsmp2201 with 8.8 alleles per locus as average. The sizes of alleles ranged from 98bp at locus Xpsmp2068 to 377bp at locus M13_Xpsmp2203. The results have demonstrated the potential genetic variability inherent of the collected pearl millet accessions which can be explored for millet improvement.