EST-SSR based genetic diversity analysis and their tagging to coding and non-coding regions in Moringa oliefera

Moringa oliefera is one of the most important vegetable tree crops with every part being important for commercial utilization with nutritional and medicinal properties. Development of genomic resources such as expressed sequence tag-based simple sequence repeat markers (EST-SSRs) are desirable due their multiallelic and polymorphic nature. In the present study, a total of 48 polymorphic EST-SSRs were mined from transcriptome data of different parts of Moringa plant. A set of 32 genotypes selected from the germplasmhave been assessed for diversity using these markers. The mean expected heterozygosity (HE) and observed heterozygosity (HO) was 0.827 and 0.990, respectively. The PIC value ranged from 0.511 to 0.94. While assigning function to the ESTs, one of the ESTs has been deciphered to contain a CTP. According to the peptide database, ESTs with EST-SSRs had similarity to PR genes and also showed presence of PlantCirc RNA. These developed EST-SSRs were tagged with different triats which can be useful in future population genetics analysis and breeding programs in Moringa species.