The 2012 ASHS Annual Conference

The genus Miscanthus has been focused as an alternative bioenergy crop because of its higher productivity potential, non-food crop, marginal land use and stress resistance. However, despite the agronomic and economic significance, the whole genome and molecular markers study of the Miscanthus is primitive. Molecular markers associated with agriculturally important traits can be used for MAS (Marker Assisted Selection) at early stage to accelerate breeding of valuable cultivars. In the previous study, we obtained the ESTs (Expressed sequence tags) from the cDNA libraries using different tissue of leaf and rhizome in the M. sinensis (diploid) and M. sacchariflorus (tetraploid). In this study, we used a SSR search-module program ‘SciRoKo’ to find SSR markers. The number of SSR motif in the EST library was 1,158 for M. sacchariflorus (leaf: 549, rhizome: 609) and 1,724 for M. sinensis (leaf: 948, rhizome: 776). The most common repeat motifs were tri-nucleotide, while penta-nucleotide was lowest. Among the SSR markers detected, major tri-nucleotide repeats were CCG and AGC. Based on the ORF Predictor to screen the SSR location in the genome, the majority of the SSR motifs were located in the ORF regions than untranslated regions (UTR). Even though the tri-nucleotides were localized in the ORF region highly, di- and tetra-nucleotides were more frequent in UTR regions. We will use those SSR markers to identify enhanced biomass Miscanthus genotype and to map the quantitative trait loci (QTL) of interest.