Genetic diversity of the most important sugar cane cultivars in Mexico

Résumé 0

"Despite the economical importance of sugarcane, until the present-date no studies have been carried out to evaluatesugarcane germplasm from Mexican fields. The objective of this study was to evaluate genetic diversity of, and establish therelationship between, 15 different cultivars of sugarcane cultivated in Mexico. AFLP amplification using twelve primers pairsresulted in a total of 884 scorable markers of which 489 were polymorphic including 9 that were unique to a particular cultivar.The similarity values based en AFLPs ranged from 0.72 to 0.9, with values closer to 1 indicating a high percentage of geneticsimilarity among the cultivars analyzed and suggest that the Saccharum germplasm collection in Mexico present a geneticallynarrow base. This is likely due to the fact that their parental breeding lines used to develop these cultivars are the same or are veryclose to each other. However, analysis identified cultivars that are potentially important source of diverse sugarcane germplasm.For example, Mex-73523 and CP 722086 cultivars had not been extensively utilized in the development of other sugarcanecultivars and having characteristic of agronomic interest, they can be used as progenitors for the creation of varieties with a widergenetic. base"