Genome-wide Development and Physical Mapping of SSR Markers in Sugar Beet (Beta vulgaris L.)

Abstract

Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) is one of the important sugar crops. Thus, development of molecular tools to understand molecular mechanism of agronomic traits such as root yield and sucrose content by using comprehensive genome analysis is important for sugar beet molecular breeding. A prime to such a comprehensive genome analysis is high throughout marker development. In the present study, mining of sugar beet genome for simple sequence repeats (SSRs) revealed 37704 motifs. Dinucleotide repeats were the most abundant accounting for 69.3 %. A total of 22500 SSR primers were developed and these markers were physically mapped in sugar beet genome. The markers distributed over nine chromosomes and the map had a higher resolution (16.73 kb SSR-1). Also 102 SSR markers were found to be putatively associated with carbohydrate synthesis. The present study is the first report of genome-wide development of SSR markers and construction of SSR based physical map in sugar beet. SSR markers increased the number of available sugar beet specific SSR markers by 55-fold. SSR markers developed in the present study are valuable molecular genetic tools for comprehensive genome analysis to facilitate sugar beet molecular breeding