2010 Volume 60 Issue 4 Pages 436-446
Lotus japonicus is a model legume used by researchers worldwide to study nodulation and other aspects of legume biology. We investigated 15 morphological traits in a large collection of wild L. japonicus accessions collected in Japan, and also analyzed the genetic diversity among them, in order to develop a core collection based on genome-wide SSR polymorphisms. We found a wide diversity of morphological traits among the accessions. A total of 321 putative alleles were detected using 25 SSR primer pairs. The average observed and expected heterozygosity scores for individual loci were 0.014 and 0.772, respectively, indicating a high degree of homozygosity. The accessions were divided into 9 clusters based on GST’ and STRUCTURE analyses. In addition, we selected 20 accessions to serve as the representative core collection based on SSR analysis. The range of morphological traits in the core collection was representative of that found in the entire collection. This core collection will be useful for genome-wide studies and data obtained for this model species should lead to numerous practical applications for crop legumes. All accessions from the entire collection are available from Legume Base (http://www.legumebase.brc.miyazaki-u.ac.jp/), a section of the National BioResource Project in Japan.
