Analysis of genetic diversity and population structure of maize accessions from Republic of Korea

Modern farming techniques have greatly increased production levels of maize and they have also led to greater genetic uniformity. In this study, 12 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were used to analyze the genetic diversity and population structure of 217 maize collections from the Republic of Korea. 99 alleles were detected with an average of 8.25 per locus. The mean values of major allele frequency, expected heterozygosity and polymorphism information content (PIC) for each SSR locus were 0.57, 0.12 and 0.55, respectively. The model based structure analysis revealed the presence of three clusters with 71.43% membership and the exception of 28.57% admixture. The gene distances of clusters (1 to 3) were 0.58, 0.57 and 0.57, respectively. This study represents the analysis of genetic structure and provides a benchmark for future studies dealing with fine scale patterns of genetic diversity of maize accessions in South Korea.