Agro-morphological and Genotypic Diversity of some Local Egyptian Teosinte (Zea mexicana) Genotypes

Assessment of genotypic and phenotypic diversity is one of the principal and essential steps in plant breeding programs to assess variability among available teosinte genotypes along with Sequence-Related Amplified Polymorphism (SRAP) marker analysis as tools for future improvement and use in future maize teosinte hybrids The present study was carried out at Sakha Agricultural Research Station in the summer 2019 and 2020 seasons. Four summer forage crops of teosinte genotypes namely, Teosinte Sakha, T. Gemmiza 4, T. Baladey and T.Early, were evaluated for fresh and dry forage yield and some traits. Three cuts were taken from four genotypes. Mean values of forage crops genotypes revealed highly significant differences. T. Early had the highest fresh and dry forage yields at the three cuts and total over the two seasons which had 41.50, 78.56, 52.50 and 172.56 kg/plot for fresh and 5.03, 9.79, 8.40 and 32.22 for dry yield, respectively followed by T. Gemmiza 4 and Teosinte Sakha. Also, the highest mean values for plant height cm was T. Early which had 110.13, 155.25 and 107.38 cm followed by T. Gemmiza 4 which had 102.88, 146.63 and 99.38 cm for first, second and third cut ,respectively. The same trend for stem diameter cm where, the highest mean values were T. Early and T. Gemmiza 4. Meanwhile, the highest means for crude protein% was T. Baladey which had 13.35%, 11.89% and10.88% followed by T. Sakha which had 12.84%,12.49 %and 11.08% for first ,second and third cut, respectively. While, the highest means for crude fiber % was T. Early which had 32.89%, 33.63% and 34.44% followed by T. Gemmiza which had 32.23%, 32.33% and 34.05% for first, second and third cut, respectively. Ten SRAP combination primers were used, highest polymorphism (80 %) was found by primer (me5+em3), and lowest polymorphism (33.3%) was found by primer me1+ em3. Polymorphic information content (PIC) values were evaluated to assess the genetic diversity of ten selected primers were ranged from 0.28 % related to primer combination me2+em6 to highest PIC was 0.39%, which was related to primer combination me1+em4 indicating that this primer is highly informative. The dendrogram of SRAP markers had clustered all available teosinte genotypes into two major clusters include the closest genotypes together. SRAP markers confirm that there were highly genetic information differences among all the four teosinte genotypes which are useful for their utilization in further breeding programs for maize teosinte hybrids.