Validation of male sex-specific UBC-8071200 ISSR marker and its conversion into sequence tagged sites marker in Jojoba: a high precision oil yielding dioecious shrub

There is a recent surge in the marker-assisted selection of desired sex type among economically important dioecious crops. Simmondsia chinensis (Jojoba), a dioecious crop is of immense agricultural importance where only the female plants are preferred for commerce. DNA fingerprinting technology, ISSR analysis along with bulk segregant analysis (BSA), has been carried out on a diverse set of 17- to18-year-old mature male and female plants of Jojoba to validate a male sex-specific ISSR marker, UBC-807(1200) on larger population that comprises 330 female and 255 male plants of Jojoba. This male sex-specific DNA fragment of 1200bp was cloned and sequenced. The sequence was found to be 1120bp in length and based on the sequence information, a pair of sequence tagged sites primers was developed that amplified a single 800bp band, consistently only in all the male populations while no amplification was seen in their female counterparts. The marker was named as Jojoba Male Sex Marker which was further validated on 330 female plants from 22 genotypes and 255 male plants from 17 genotypes.