Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The genetic diversity within and among 27 accessions of local maize maintained at the National Gene bank of Mozambique was studied. The accessions were originally collected from farmers’ fields in 8 of the 10 agro-ecological zones of Mozambique. Eleven SSR markers were used. A total of 84 alleles were found with an average of 7.63 alleles per locus. The effective number of alleles per locus (Ne) ranged from 1.37 to 6.80 with an average of 3.47. The values for observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranged from 0.10 to 0.68 with an average of 0.36. Expected heterozygosity (He) ranged from 0.27 to 0.86 with an average of 0.67. Shannon’s information index (I) ranged between 0.68 and 2.11 with an average of 1.40 per locus. Estimation of genetic diversity at each locus across all accessions (Nei) ranged from 0.27 to 0.85 with an average of 0.67. For the 27 accessions the effective number of alleles (Ne) ranged from 2.06 to 3.21 with an average of 2.56. The observed heterozygosity (Ho) across the eleven loci ranged from 0.25 to 0.48 with an average value of 0.35. Ten of the accessions scored less than the mean of the observed heterozygosity while four accessions recorded the same value as the mean observed heterozygosity of all accessions. AMOVA revealed significant differentiation among the ungrouped 27 maize accessions but most of the variation (88.28%) was found within accessions. There was no differentiation among accessions when they were grouped according to agro-ecological zones. Both the cluster analysis and the PCoA showed no clear grouping of accessions belonging to the same agro-ecological zones.