Insights into Musa balbisiana and Musa acuminata species divergence and development of genic microsatellites by transcriptomics approach

The banana species, Musa balbisiana Colla, and Musa acuminata are progenitors of cultivated banana and belong to the family Musaceae. M. balbisiana, a wild banana species harbors many useful important traits such as disease resistance and abiotic stress tolerance and represents an important genetic resource for banana improvement programs. Therefore, in our study, we for the first time have produced transcriptome data from 12 different tissues of Musa balbisiana collection ‘Bee Hee Kela’ and Musa acuminata ssp. burmannicoides — ‘Calcutta-4’ separately using Illumina GA II X technology. We have done a comparative analysis of the transcriptome of these two species. The high quality reads were assembled and mapped to the DH-Pahang reference genome. A total of 9857 sequences from BB genome and a total of 4424 sequences from the AA genome had SSRs and validation was done for a few selected SSRs. We have analyzed effective number of codons, calculated Ka/Ks ratio, and overall GC and GC3 contents in the two species. In the present study a large number of gene based SSR markers developed for both Musa species will facilitate molecular marker breeding strategies, development of a genetic linkage map and QTL analysis.