Vol. 9, Issue 4 (2020)

Pearl millet is the fourth most important food crop of the world next to rice, wheat and sorghum and is grown for dual purpose as grain and fodder. Downy mildew is one of the most widely spread and destructive disease of pearl millet, potentially resulting decline in production of pearl millet in India and western Africa. A major advantage of using molecular markers and biochemical marker for the screening the genotypes against disease at laboratory level will save time to screen the genotype compared to that of under field condition.

The main target of the ongoing research was to screen all genotypes to identify putative marker linked with the resistant and susceptible trait. In present investigation, eight downy mildew resistant genotypes viz., R15046, R15123, R15185, R15212, R15349, R15554, R15705, R16463 and three susceptible genotypes S21, S92, S7042 were screened by using SSR markers.

In SSR analysis data it was detected, the average 66.66% polymorphism with 0.197 PIC value per primer was detected. Xpsmp-2273 pearl millet specific primer amplified with ~200 bp size present in all eight resistant genotypes and found absent in susceptible genotypes showing 100% polymorphism with 0.318 PIC value. The genetic similarity values were retrieved using Dice coefficient for SSR data ranged from 0.33-0.92 with an average of 0.62. This primer has clearly differentiated the resistant and susceptible genotypes. This result further can be validated and utilized in QTL studies related with downy mildew resistance in pearl millet.