Genetic assessment of maize landraces from former Yugoslavia

A collection of 2217 landraces from former Yugoslavia region is maintained at Maize Research Institute Zemun Polje gene bank. All local varieties from the former Yugoslavia are classified into 18 groups. These agroecological groups encompass early introduced flint types grown on small and isolated areas, later introduced dent types that spread on wide areas of crop production and types created through hybridization between these two kernel types. The objective of this research was to study population structure, genetic diversity and relationships of nine flint and nine dent accessions belonging to different agro-ecological groups using phenotypic and simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The 18 analyzed landraces displayed great variation for most analyzed traits, but flint landraces were more diverse. Ten SSR probes revealed total of 56 and 62 alleles in flint and dent landraces, respectively. Eight specific alleles (i.e. alleles found only in one landrace or only within flint, i.e. dent landraces) were detected with five probes. One specific allele was found in flint and seven alleles in dent landraces. These differences in allele structure point to different origins and possibly different purposes of flint and dent genotypes. Both phenotypic and SSR analyses could distinguish most flint and dent landraces, but not agro-ecological groups. The results revealed a significant genetic heterogeneity indicating that the analyzed landraces could be valuable sources of genetic variability. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. TR31028: Exploitation of maize diversity to improve grain quality and drought tolerance]