Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in Banana (Musa spp.) Breeding Germplasm

Bananas (Musa spp.) are one of the most highly consumed fruits globally, grown in the tropical and sub-tropical regions. We evaluated 845 Musa accessions from the breeding programs of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) - Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) of Uganda, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) and the National Research Centre for Banana (NRCB) of India. Accessions from the in vitro gene bank at the International Transit Centre (ITC) in Belgium were included to provide a baseline of available global diversity. A total of 22,683 informative single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers were used to estimate and characterize the genetic diversity and population structure and identify overlaps and unique material among the breeding programs. An average polymorphic information content (PIC) of 0.25 was obtained whereas the average observed heterozygosity (Ho) and expected heterozygosity (He) across all loci were 0.1