Molecular diversity of Annona species and proximate fruit composition of selected genotypes.

Understanding the genetic variation in germplasm is of utmost importance for crop improvement. Therefore, efforts were made to analyse the molecular marker based genetic diversity of 20 Annona genotypes from five different species of family Annonaceae. During analysis, a set of 11 RAPD primers yielded a total of 152 bands with 80.01 % polymorphism and PIC for RAPD ranged from 0.86 to 0.92 with a mean of 0.89. With 93.05 % polymorphism, 12 SSR primers produced 39 amplicons. The PIC for SSRs ranged from 0.169 to 0.694 with of average of 0.339. The dendrogram produced from pooled molecular data of 11 RAPD and 12 SSR primers showed seven clusters at a cutoff value of 0.78. The dendrogram discriminated all the Annona genotypes suggesting that significant genetic diversity was present among the genotypes. Proximate fruit composition study of nine fruiting genotypes of Annona revealed that A. squamosa possessed significantly higher amount of most of studies biochemical which gives an opportunity to fruit breeders to improve the other Annona species. Likewise, A. muricata being rich in seed oil content can be exploited in oil industries.