Microsatellite Markers to Complement Distinctness, Uniformity, StabilityTesting of Brassica chinensis (Xiao Baicai) Varieties

摘要

Brassica chinensis varieties are mostly consumed as vegetables. In order to assess utility of microsatellitemarkers for testing distinctness, uniformity and stability of B. chinensis varieties, we used nine polymorphic microsatellitemarker loci (with a total of 131 alleles) to evaluate four open pollinated and four hybrid varieties of B. chinensis. Each varietywas represented by 48 randomly sampled individuals from a population of 150. Morphological evaluations were alsoconducted to the same samples. Compared with morphological evaluations, the microsatellite analysis provided a higherdegree of separation and reflected greater uniformity for the three hybrid varieties by cluster analysis, Principal CoordinatesAnalysis (PCA) and assignment test. Average pair-wise Jaccard similarities and statistical tests by AMOVA (analysisof molecular variance) also suggested higher levels of intra-variety uniformity. It was also noted that there was no significantcorrelation between the genetic and morphological distance matrices (Mantel test). We conclude that microsatellitegenotyping can be a valuable tool to complement morphological assessment of Brassica vegetable varieties for distinctivenessand uniformity.