Characterization of Little millet (Panicum sumatrense) varieties using Morphological descriptors and SSR based DNA fingerprinting

Little millet (Panicum sumatrense) is also known as Indian millet. It is cultivated as a cereal across Nepal, India and Western Myanmar, and its center of origin is West Africa. The wild relative of little millet is P.psilopodium. It forms an important role in tribal agriculture in Eastern Ghats of India. Little millet is grown on temperate and tropical climate. Little millet is an annual tuffed grass with slender culms, soft leaves, inflorescence a panicle with erect hairy branches, spikelets in pairs with two glumes. The discovery of syntenic regions among the cereals which aids to identify useful alleles of important agromorphological traits. An earlier study by Ali et al [2] developed 48 EST-SSR markers among 37 accessions of the little millets. Only limited reports are available on the genetic diversity of little millet germplasm, that too is based on a limited number of DNA markers [3, 4]. Thus the limited sequence information available in the little millets necessitates the search for the available markers from the maize, barnyard millet, and pearl millet due to the cereal millet synteny and also the availability of the SSR markers. The little millet husked grain is cooked as like rice and sometimes made into flour for different types of food preparations. The soft straw is palatable to cattle and the green plant has potentialities as a quick-growing fodder. The present investigation was conducted to carry out the comprehensive characterization of little millet genotypes based on Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) characters for Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Authority (PPVFRA) registration because of its property to identify the dissimilarity between the newly released and the existing genotypes as well as to distinguish the germplasm. Cereal crops exhibit cross-genera transferability, of DNA markers into many cereals such as maize, Characterization of little millet (Panicum sumatrense) varieties using morphological descriptors and SSR based DNA fingerprinting