Cross-species Amplification of Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) EST-SSRs within Hyacinth Bean, Pea and Soybean

Abstract

Background: The emerging expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs) offer an important approach to investigate plant genetic diversity. Methods: A total of seventy common bean polymorphic EST-SSRs were utilized for assessing genetic diversity among 19 hyacinth, 20 pea and 21 soybean accessions, respectively. The genetic statistics and principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) were conducted by GenAlEx 6.5. Result: The transferability rates of common bean EST-SSRs in hyacinth, pea and soybean were 27.1%, 20.0% and 21.4%. And the ratios of polymorphic SSR markers in these legumes were 42.1%, 85.71% and 100.0%, respectively. The hyacinth, pea and soybean accessions could be assigned to three distinct clusters for the germplasm types greatly depending on the geographic distributions. The present results revealed that the common bean EST-SSRs are highly transferable to hyacinth bean, pea and soybean. Moreover, these transferable markers would provide a set of inexpensive and effective tools for future research on molecular breeding, taxonomy and comparative mapping.