Repertoire of SSRs in the Castor Bean Genome and Their Utilization in Genetic Diversity Analysis in Jatropha curcas

Castor bean and Jatropha contain seed oil of industrial importance, share taxonomical and biochemical similarities, which can be explored for identifying SSRs in the whole genome sequence of castor bean and utilized in Jatropha curcas. Whole genome analysis of castor bean identified 5,80,986 SSRs with a frequency of 1 per 680 bp. Genomic distribution of SSRs revealed that 27% were present in the non-genic region whereas 73% were also present in the putative genic regions with 26% in 5'UTRs, 25% in introns, 16% in 3'UTRs and 6% in the exons. Dinucleotide repeats were more frequent in introns, 5'UTRs and 3'UTRs whereas trinucleotide repeats were predominant in the exons. The transferability of randomly selected 302 SSRs, from castor bean to 49 J. curcas genotypes and 8 Jatropha species other than J. curcas, showed that 211 (∼70%) amplified on Jatropha out of which 7.58% showed polymorphisms in J. curcas genotypes and 12.32% in Jatropha species. The higher rate of transferability of SSR markers from castor bean to Jatropha coupled with a good level of PIC (polymorphic information content) value (0.2 in J. curcas genotypes and 0.6 in Jatropha species) suggested that SSRs would be useful in germplasm analysis, linkage mapping, diversity studies and phylogenetic relationships, and so forth, in J. curcas as well as other Jatropha species.