Abstract

Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl is an important horticultural and medicinal crop grown worldwide in the food and pharmaceutical industries. The crop exhibits extensive phenotypic and genetic variation useful for cultivar development targeting economic traits; however, limited genomic resources are available for effective germplasm characterization into breeding and conservation strategies. This study determined the genetic relationships and population structure in a collection of different accessions of bottle gourd derived from Chile, Asia, and South Africa by using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers and mining of simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci derived from genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) data. The GBS resulted in 12,766 SNPs classified as moderate to highly informative, with a mean polymorphic information content of 0.29. The mean gene diversity of 0.16 indicated a low genetic differentiation of the accessions. Analysis of molecular variance revealed less differentiation between (36%) as compared to within (48%) bottle gourd accessions, suggesting that a random mating system dominates inbreeding. Population structure revealed two genetically differentiated groups comprising South African accessions and an admixed group with accessions of Asian and Chilean origin. The results of SSR loci mining from GBS data should be developed and validated before being used in diverse bottle gourd accessions. The SNPs markers developed in the present study are useful genomic resources in bottle gourd breeding programs for assessing the extent of genetic diversity for effective parental selection and breeding.