MORPHOLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF SWEET POTATO ACCESSIONS

ABSTRACT For any good breeding work and its subsequent improvement, a knowledge in genetic diversity is very necessary. Genetic diversity of eighty seven Sweetpotato accessions assembled from various potential growing areas and two research institutions in the country, Crops Research Institute at Fumesua in Ashanti Region and Plant Genetic Resources Institute in the Eastern Region were put together and investigated using Morphological and Molecular characterization approaches.Both qualitative and quantitative traits were employed to identify differences in the accessions used for the investigations. Twenty one Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) primers selected were used to screen and detected 107 polymorphisms and 5 monomorphisms. Principal Component Analysis clustered the accessions into 5 groups for quantitative traits, combination of quantitative and qualitative traits produced 6 groups and qualitative traits produced 6 groups respectively. Cluster analysis based on the Unweighted Paired Grouped Arithmetic Average (UPGMA) grouped the accessions into 13 clusters. Genetic distances resulting from the analysis of the dendrogram showed genetic diversity within the sweet potato accessions. However, hierarchical and non-hierarchical analyses identified Zambezi and Gweri as the same. Sauti showed the highest genetic distance of 82% as compared to Zambezi which had lowest distance of 7%. With the Core collection for future breeding and other agronomic programmes, twenty two accessions were selected for conservation in vitro and ex situ in order not to them. Breeders can depend on the selected high quality materials future breeding work.