1. Genetic diversity assessment and validation of core collection of Chinese oat with SSR markers CAAS-Bioversity Centre of Excellence, c/o Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China Zongwen Zhang, Enlai Zhang, Bin Wu, Wei Xu, Yajun Hou, Huaijun Xiang

2. Introduction Oat is one of the important food and feed cereal crops in China, with cultivation area of 0.6-0.7 million hectares annually About 4000 accessions of oat were collected and conserved in China and a core subset was developed for promoting evaluation and utilization SSR marker is useful tool in genetic diversity assessment SSR marker was used to analyze the genetic diversity of the core subset of oat collection in China to provide molecular information for further validating the core collection

3. Material and methods Core collection of oats: 458 accessions 315 native accessions 143 introduced accessions SSR marker (simple sequence repeats) DNA extraction PCR protocol Data analysis

4. Major results 72 alleles were identified, 4.8 alleles in each SSR locus M83381 is most polymorphic marker, with 11 alleles identified Average PIC is 0.6, with maximum of 0.789 expressed by M83381

5. Shannon-weaver index: –Ranged from 0.459-1.118, with highest from American accessions (1.118), followed by accessions from Eastern Europe (1.091). –Within the country, accessions from Shanxi (1.085) and Inner Mongolia (1.033) have higher diversity than others

6. OriginsDiversity Index America (AM)1.118 Western Europe (WE)1.091 Shanxi (SX)1.085 Inner Mongolia (IM)1.033 Other countries (OT)0.951 Eastern Europe (EE)0.931 Hebei (HB)0.923 Qinghai (QH)0.918 Gansu/Ningxia (GN)0.833 Southwest (SW)0.828 Northeast (NE)0.824 Shaanxi (SH)0.73 Xinjiang (XJ)0.459 Total1.107 Table 2 Shannon-weaver index of accessions with different origins

7. Genetic similarity coefficient: –Ranged from 0.346-0.517 among accessions with different origins –Strong relationships between geographic accessions observed, the closer the geographical areas, the closer the accessions from those areas Principle coordinate analysis –Group 1: Shanxi, Gansu and Ningxia –Group 2: Southwest of China –Group 3: Western Europe

8. □ NE ▲ EE ▽ GN ★ OT ※ HB ◆ AM ☆ IM ♀ QH ▓ SX ◎ SH △ SW ● WE ♂ XJ Fig 1. Two-dimension principal coordinate analysis based on SSR data