Abstract
Precise identification of cotton cultivars and hybrids is requisite to facilitate management of germplasm resources and successful hybridization programs. Fingerprinting based on minimal core set of highly informative primers will be more enlightening to unveil genetic constitution among cotton cultivars and hybrids from distinct growing regions of china. Thirty-eight upland cotton cultivars and 55 hybrids were selected from three cotton growing regions of china mainland i.e. yellow river cotton valley (YRCV), Yangtze river cotton valley (YzRCV) and north west dry region (NWDR); featured with perceptible climatology. Twelve randomly selected cultivar and hybrids (representative sample of the three regions) were employed to reveal polymorphism across mapped SSRs. Sixtysix genome-covered polymorphic SSRs were employed to assess genetic relatedness among all accessions. The results showed a polymorphism information content range from 0.34-0.86 and resolving power 0.04-2.45 for genome-covered SSRs. Higher PIC and Rp values rendered selection of 13 highly informative potential core SSRs, whose average PIC and Rp values were 0.80 and 1.64, respectively. Moreover, Jaccard’s similarity coefficients of genome-covered and potential core SSRs were compared and found to be related. Potential core SSRs substantiated clustering results of genome-covered SSRs and successfully discriminated all accession. Overall clustering pattern and revealed genetic constitution of tested material suggested that the 13 potential core SSRs could assure comparable results with higher resolution as compared to that of genome-covered SSRs.