Assessment of the genetic diversity in a collection of Erianthus arundinaceus

Erianthus arundinaceus, a wild relative of sugarcane has a number of traits including tolerance to environmental stresses desired by sugarcane breeders. The value of genetic diversity studies in providing useful information for introgression breeding and germplasm conservation is well known. A previous study reported little genetic diversity in a number of Indonesian E. arundinaceus while Indian E . arundinaceus was more diverse. A small number of Chinese E. arundinaceus was observed as being relatively diverse. However, an assessment of the genetic diversity of E. arundinaceus from the major geographical areas in the world has not been reported before. In this study, 207 E. arundinaceus accessions from China, Indonesia, India, New Guinea, Philippines and Vietnam were sampled for genetic diversity analysis using AFLP markers. Three AFLP primer combinations generated 286 markers in total, with the percentage of polymorphism observed being 99.3%. A dendrogram and PCA diagram were constructed based on the matrix of similarity analyzed with UPGMA method by NTSYS software. The results showed that: (1) a high level of diversity found within the Chinese collection compared with the Indonesian collection and (2) there was a general division amongst clones from China based on those collected from eastern versus western parts of the country, and clones from Yunnan province (western China) were the most diverse.