Genetic Diversity and Relationship of Selected Cultivars of Rice, Oryza sativa L. using Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) Markers

The genetic diversity in 26 selected cultivars of rice, Oryza sativa L. using 20 decamer random primers. Out of 20, 15 RAPD primers revealed polymorphism while the remaining 5 primers showed no reaction. The primers produced a total of 71 bands of which 66 were polymorphic (95.2%). The number of polymorphic fragments for each primer varied from 1to3 with an average of 2.53 polymorphic fragments. The primer OPA-19 produced the maximum number of polymorphic bands. The RAPD data was analyzed to determine the genetic similarity coefficients which ranged from 0.46 to 0.81. Cluster analysis was performed using Ward’s method) using the Jaccard’s similarity coefficient. The Wards method dendrogram resolved the selected rice cultivars into two to three major clusters.