Cross-genera Transferability of Microsatellite Loci for Asian Palmyra Palm (Borassus flabellifer L.)

Asian Palmyra palm, found throughout south and southeast Asia, is important for local economies, especially for sugar palm production. Unlike its related species, such as oil palm and coconut, only a few genetic markers are available for Asian Palmyra palm. In this study, we tested the transferability of molecular markers derived from oil palm, and a set of selected markers were used for evaluating the diversity of Asian Palmyra palm growing in Thailand. From 545 primer pairs of expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) and genomic simple sequence repeat (gSSR) markers, 317 (58.17%) primer pairs were able to amplify the Asian Palmyra palm DNA, and 19 (5.99%) pairs were polymorphic. After extensively genotyping 164 samples from 12 populations, we obtained 25 loci with the polymorphic information content (PIC) average of 0.37 and allele numbers ranging from one to five. The observed and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0 to 1 and 0 to 0.76, respectively. A dendrogram showed separation of the palm populations into two clades, between north-eastern and southern-central regions. This study provides a set of microsatellite markers for use in further genetic studies of Asian Palmyra palm.