Assessment of Genetic Diversity among 12 Sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) Genotypes from five states in Northern Nigeria using RAPD markers

Sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) is an important oil seed crop cultivated in many regions of the world. It is known as the king of oil seeds due to the high oil content (50-60%) in its seed. Nigeria being one of the top 10 largest producers of sesame has tremendous potentiality to increase production in order to promote exports. Vast genetic diversity is available in sesame which may facilitate the breeder to develop new varieties, provided that the genetic distance between accessions is properly understood. In this study, 12 sesame accessions collected from five states (Benue, Kaduna, Kogi, Nassarawa and Niger) in Northern Nigeria, were subjected to RAPD analysis to understand genetic differences among them. Among the 12 accessions, 10 RAPD primers efficiently amplified genomic DNA to produce a total of 63 RAPD fragments, of which 56 (88.89%) were polymorphic. Each primer generated 3 to 8 amplified fragments with an average of 6.3 bands/primer. A dendrogram constructed from pooled data revealed 11 clusters showing a high level of polymorphism. A single accession (BE-02) was relatively distinct from rest of the accessions at 4999.50 similarity coefficient exhibiting genetic divergent while two accessions (BE-01 and NA-02) were clustered together revealing genetic similarity which could be efficiently used in breeding programme. The results revealed that RAPD markers can efficiently evaluate genetic variation in the sesame germplasm.