Analysis of genetic variation in eggplant and related Solanum species using sequence-related amplified polymorphism markers

Collection and characterization of all sorts of germplasm resources are required for the development of new cultivars. Molecular characterization is more reliable than morphological characterization. Here, we employed sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) markers to evaluate genetic variation in a diverse collection of 56 Solanum accessions. Fifty-five SRAP primer combinations were used and a total of 635 polymorphic bands were observed. Cluster analysis by the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages based on similarity matrices indicated that there were three clusters: (i) S. melongena; (ii) S. aethiopicum; (iii) S. surattense. The coefficients of genetic similarity among all the accessions ranged from 0.04 to 0.96 with an average of 0.73, and averaged 0.78 among S. melongena accessions originated from China, indicating extensive genetic variation. These results demonstrated that SRAP can be efficiently used to estimate genetic diversity and analyze phylogenetic relationship.