Abstract:
Banana is an important fruit of India and in Odisha it is also a highly demanded fruit. Banana improvement
programme mainly depends on genetic variability present in the population. The present investigation
was done to assess the molecular diversity present amongst the local dessert banana genotypes of Odisha
along with some national released cultivars based on Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR) markers.
For the present study ten ISSR primers were used to differentiate 22 banana genotypes. Total seventy
six scorable fragments were obtained, out of which 36 (47.4%) were polymorphic and 39 (51.3%) were
monomorphic. Similarity index were estimated using the Dice coefficient of similarity (Nei and Li 1979).
The genetic similarity values ranged from 0.71 to 0.96. At 90 % phenon level 22 genotypes were distributed
in fourteen clusters. The results revealed twenty five percent variability at genetic level based on ten ISSR
markers which could be utilised for further banana improvement programme
