1. Introduction
Among the legumes,
Vigna is an agriculturally important taxon. The genus
Vigna belonging to subgenus
Ceratotropis, tribe Phasleoleae, family Fabaceae, include more than 150
Vignaspecies. The majority of members belonging to
Vigna are wild species from Asia and Africa continents [
1,
2]. The domesticated members of
Vigna include 10 species such as mungbean (
V. radiata L. Wilczek), ricebean (
V. umbellata (Thunb.) Ohwi & Ohashi), adzuki bean (
V. angularis (Willd.) Ohwi & Ohashi), urdbean (
V. mungo L. Hepper), moth bean (
V. aconitifolia (Jacq.) Marechal), cowpea (
V. unguiculata L. Walpers), creole bean (
V. reflex-pilosa) and Bambara groundnuts (
V. subterranean (L.) Verdc.) [
3,
4]. Except creole bean (2n=2x=44, tetraploid), all these cultivated species are diploid in nature (2n=2x=22). The subgenus
Ceratotropis is further grouped in three divisions namely
Ceratotropis (mungbean,blackgram)
, Aconitifoliae (mothbean) and
Angularis (adzuki bean and creole bean) [
5]. This subgenus is the dockyard of desirable adaptive genes for evolution of climate resilient
Vigna cultigens. In India, enormous diversity of
Vigna species occur in the Western Ghats (Gujrat, Maharashtra, Nilgiris, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu), Eastern Ghats (Odisha, West Bengal), Central plateu (Chhatisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra); North Western Himalayas (parts of Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh) [
6].
Among
Vigna, Mungbean (
Vignaradiata L. Wilczek) is a major pulse popularly referred as green gram, golden gram, oregon pea, chickasawpea and mung [
7]. It is autogamous crop with 2n=2x= 22 chromosomes which spanned about 574 Megabasepairgenetic material [
8]. The small genome size makes it a suitable model crop for studying the evolutionary and genetic diversity studies [
9]. It contains ample amount of easily digestible protein which is very much useful in addressing health problems such as diabetes and malnutrition. The haulms of mungbean is generally used in animal husbandry for feeding to domesticated animals as it does not have any negative effects on animal health [
10,
11].The mungbean seeds are free of anti-nutritional factors (trypsin inhibitors, tannin, phytohemagglutinin, etc.,) [
12]. Apart from its use as food and feed, mungbean is sought-after for its N-fixing ability in soil through symbiotic association with
Rhizobium spp.,
Bradyrhizobium bacteria in their root nodules.The nitrogen fixation mechanism enhances the soil fertility which in turn increases the financial condition of small and marginal farmers. The crop is also acclaimed for its ability to perform well in marginal lands, under limited moisture and essential mineral elements available in surroundings mainly owing to their symbiotic association with N-fixingRhizobium bacteria and arbuscularmycorrhizal (AM) fungi that help to ameliorate themineral elements acquisition from humus and crop-establishment in such lands [
13].
The crop is grown popularly in South and North America, West Indies, Australia, Asia and Tropical and Subtropical Africa. Currently, mungbean is grown on about 7.3 million hectares mainly in Asia across different seasons (spring, summer,
kharifand
rabi) and the cultivation is expanding into Africa and Australia [
14,
15]. The worldwide mungbean harvest is 5.3 million tons and 51% is from India after Myanmar and China [
15]. In India, mungbean occupies 4.32 million hectares area mainly in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and resulted into a harvest of 2.17 million tons [
16]. At global level, India produced about 54% of total mungbean production with 65% acreage of world mungbean acreage [
17]. The Asian continent exhibited a knee-high average productivity of mungbean due to the inherently low yielding potential of the cultivars and their susceptibility to fungal, bacterial, viral and other foliar diseases [
18,
19]. However, in the present scenario themungbean cultivars which matures in less time, photo-insensitive, stable and high level of resistance against disease and insect pests and high yielding in nature provides a chance to cultivate mungbean as catch crop in cereal cropping system (rice-wheat-mungbean). The diverse edapho-climatic conditions of India are well suited for sustainable food production and food security [
20]. Further expansion of mungbean cultivation is linked to pace of genetic improvement which depends upon genetic and genomic resources. Mungbean is lagging in genomics research and application of genomics assisted breeding techniques than other legume crops. Till date, 18 genetic linkage maps are available in mungbean based on RFLP, RAPD, STS, SSR from mungbean and other species [
21]. Several researchers [
22,
23,
24] developed mungbean specific DNA markers
i.e. genic SSRs and these markers used to amplify the mungbean genome are mostly other legume crop specific. The SSR markers from within
Vigna species (cowpea, common bean, adzuki bean) and other genera such as soybean have been applied in mungbean and of these adzuki bean and common bean SSR markers showed a high rate of amplification of 72.7% and 60.6% [
25,
26]. The unigene based SSR markers showed a high transferability rate of 88% in different
Vigna species [
27].
The SSR markers are most preferably used in the limited resourceful laboratories due to non-affordability of modern technologies [
28]. The general methodology of SSR development consists of three steps
i.e. preparation of SSR library, PCR and sequencing. This process is very cumbersome and expensive. Now a day’s several workers [
29,
30,
31,
32,
22,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37] have developed SSR markersbutstill limited SSR markers are available in mungbean. This has further limited the molecular mapping of many desirable characters pertaining to stress resistance in the crop. Trait based mapping is urgently required for mungbeanto strengthen the molecular marker based improvement programme.With the help of next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, it has become possible to develop and identify large numbers of SSR and other markers at low price. NGS technologies, coupled with bioinformatics approaches can massively increase the number of SSRs availability for carrying outgenetical investigations in under studied and economically important crops such as mungbean. Whole genome sequences of mungbean and urdbean varieties (ML 267 and Mash 114) was assembled at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana and an aggregate of 443,867 SSR markers were discovered in
V. radiata (cv. ML267) and
V. mungo (cv. Mash 114), of which 4,10,282 were found polymorphic
in silico. In present study, of the 250 WGS based SSR markers, a set of 200
in silico polymorphic SSRs were validated for their transferability across different
Vigna species and elucidating the underlying genetic diversity in genus
Vigna.
4. Discussion
Crop improvement is important for every crop species to make it available for mankind. For every crop improvement programmes, availability of accessible genetic variation in the crop genetic resources is indispensable. Determination of genetic diversity provides opportunity for exploitation of useful variation present in the available germplasm in breeding programme as promising parents [
47]. Pre-breeding is an approach that harnesses the useful variability in unadapted genetic material which cannot be utilized as such in breeding populationsand serves necessarily as the major stride for employing utilization of genetic variation in improvement programmes [
48,
49,
50,
51,
52,
53,
54,
55]. The genetic variability existing in the gene banks helps in conservation, characterization and implementation of genetic variation in crop improvement programmes [
56]. The
Vigna gene pool serves as source of ample amount of untapped genetic polymorphism is available in the wild
Vigna species [
6,
57,
4]. For unlocking the available genetic variation, DNA based molecular markers are required but limited genomic resources is available in mungbean.
The present study involved validation of 200 SSR markers out of 250 which were developed from mungbean cv. ML 267 and urdbean cv. Mash 114 using whole genome sequence strategy at School of Agriculture Biotechnology (SAB), Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana [
39]. These SSR markers were flanking dinucleotide SSR motifs and covered all 11 linkage groups of mungbean and urdbean. Chromosome 7 has the maximum number of 45 SSR markers whereas chromosome 9 has minimum of 8 SSR markers. Rest of the SSR markers are distributed unevenly on 5, 8, 6, 1, 11, 4, 3, 2 and 10 chromosomes. The SSR markers are comprised of ten different types of dinucleotide repeat motifs and two repeat motifs
i.e.(AT)n and (TA)n were predominant. These two dinucleotide repeats (AT/TA) accounted 52.40 per cent of total repeat motifs. In general, it has been observed that di-nucleotide repeats are mainly present in many legume crops [
58] but tri-nucleotide repeats have been commonly found in mungbean [
35,
59,
60] and in other legume crops as in pea [
61], cowpea [
27], chickpea [
62], common bean [
63] and horse gram [
64]. The mononucleotide repeat motifs have been observed in relative abundance in mungbean [
65]. Higher number of mono- and tetra-nucleotide repeats was also reported from transcriptome sequencing of adzuki bean [
66]. The transcriptome based SSRs can be developed from mononucleotide repeat because such type of markers exhibit high polymorphism. Similarly, the whole genome based SSR developed from mononucleotide repeats will also be more polymorphic than other repeats. However, the chances of error like DNA slippage during PCR amplification by polymerase enzyme machinery cannot be ruled out. Hence, in order to overcome this limitation, dinucleotide repeats were selected for the study.
Simple sequence repeats (SSR) are tandem repeated sequences (1–6 nucleotides), having high rate of polymorphism, reproducibility, co-dominant nature and abundantly distributed throughout the genome. SSRs exhibited excellent degree of transferability betwixt and amongst the closely related species or genera which makes SSR useful molecular marker for the estimation of variation at gene level, mapping of economically important loci and breeding programmes based on molecular markers. The SSR marker transferability is relied on the divergence betwixt the individual accessions. The closer the genetic distance betwixt the accessions, higher the transferability of SSR markers [
67]. Within the same species of same genus or across the related genus within families, SSR transferability is higherthan between different genus and families [
68]. Marker transferability is a parameter to describe closeness and crossability between the species. Mungbean and other species specific SSR markers have been used in different studies for assessing polymorphism among and between the
Vigna accessions or introgression lines. In accordance to the previous reports by Somta et al. [
69]; Tangphatsornruang et al. [
33]; Gupta et al. [
70]; Dikshit et al. [
2]; Singh et al. [
71]; Gupta et al. [
58]; SatinderKaur et al. [
72]; Simranjit Kaur et al. [
73], the present investigation showed more than 90 per cent marker transferability across the different
Vigna accessions. The successful applicability of whole genome sequence based SSRs betwixt different
Vigna species accessions showed that the flanking regions of these SSRs are adequately conserved amplification of genomic regions. The very high cross-species transferability percentage depends on the number of species analyzed and genetic distance among them.
The newly developed SSR markers in our study amplified 7 to 24 alleles (average estimate 15.7). The amplification of higher number of alleles is an indicative of the prevalent exalted genetic diversity among the
Vigna species. The 4 to 16 alleles per locus have been obtained in the Asiatic mungbean accessions using 53 SSR markers [
74]. In another study,GeetaKumari [
75] reported 9 to 31 alleles per locus in 119 mungbean accessions of 19
Vigna species. Studies by Dachapak et al. [
76], Sarr et al. [
77] and Singh et al. [
78] also amplified alleles in the range of 15-25 in zombie pea, cowpea and mungbean respectively. Heterozygosity and PIC value are the two important estimates of genetic diversity at genotypic level. The high PIC value in present study is in accordance with other studies [
57,
76,
78,
74,
77,
75] indicated that the microsatellite flanking regions are conserved and highly useful in inferring the phylogenetic relationship between a number of species. Higher estimates of MI and EMR of SSRs suggested high polymorphism of SSR markers. High resolving power (RP) of SSRs (0.5 to 2.0) is another diversity parameter which revealed the marker power for distinguishing betwixt genotypes.Thus, it become clear that, SSR markers have potential in different genetic studies such as crop germplasm characterization, genetic diversity assessment; marker-trait association and marker assisted breeding which helps in development of improved versions of crop varieties.
In general, the results from PCoA and UPGMA clustering were not completely consistent with structure analysis. The progenitor species of mungbean and urdbean
i.e. Vignasublobata and
Vignasilvestris clustered in two separate clusters as they have been categorized under primary and secondary gene pool. While GeetaKumari et al. [
75] reported the grouping of progenitor species in one sub-cluster. Mixed grouping of the members of all three gene pools were also observed after clustering. The primary gene pool (
V. radiata var.
setulosa) grouped with secondary (
V. trilobata) and tertiary gene pool (
V. glabrescence, V. vexillata) members under sub-cluster 1a. Similarly, secondary and tertiary gene pool species clustered together in one cluster with two sub-cluster. Similar observations have been recorded by GeetaKumari et al. [
75] where secondary (
V. trilobata) and tertiary gene pool (
V. dalzelliana, V. umbellata and
V. vexillata) species accessions clubbed in a sub-cluster.
Population structure analysis depicted two types of populations SP1 and SP2. The highest number of genotypes (14) was grouped into SP2. The accessions in SP1 were mainly of cultivated type whereas most of the wild relatives were grouped into SP2. Based upon the suitable K value which capture the best structure of population, Chen et al. [
60] and Noble et al. [
78] also divided the mungbean genotypes in cultivated and wild mungbean genotypes having higher genetic similarity. In other
Vignaspecies like cowpea, the appropriate K value proved helpful in differentiating the genotypes based upon the geographical as well as genetic similarity [
79,
80,
81]. The accessions of progenitors of mungbean and urdbean (
V. sublobata and
V. silvestris) and their relative species
V. radiata var.
setulosa and
V. radiata var.
mungo categorized separately in SP1 and SP2 while GeetaKumari et al. [
75], Singh et al. [
78], Pratap et al. [
74], Sexena et al. [
82], Pandiyan et al. [
83], Kumar et al. [
84] progenitors categorized with mungbean and urdbean accessions in one group. The secondary gene pool species accession of
V. aconitifolia grouped with tertiary gene pool accessions of
V. umbellata, V. vexillata, V. dalzellianain SP1 due to their close relationship with each other [
6]. Similar to GeetaKumari et al. [
75] the
V. umbellata and
V. trilobata categorized into two groups (SP1 and SP2).The
V. hainiana, V. stipulacea, V. glabrescence and
V. unguiculata accessions categorized in SP2 as admixture.
AMOVA provides the clues regarding the genetic variation present within and among the individual. The greater variance of 89% among the individuals revealed the presence of high genetic diversity. The low genetic diversity among the population indicates the exchange of germplasm between different regions, distribution of similar
Vigna species [
60,
80,
75]. Among the population low level of genetic diversity of 10% has been observed our study while GeetaKumari et al. [
75] obtained the high level of genetic diversity of 88.33% among the population. Fst is an estimate of population differentiation on account of genetic composition. Frankham et al. [
85] stated that the Fst estimate <0.15 is an important criterion for population discrimination. The obtained Fst value of 0.105 is near to the significant value indicating the low differentiation between individuals. The results of principal co-ordinate analysis (PCoA) and UPGMA based clustering were in agreement showing gene diversity and clear differentiation of cultivated and wild
Vigna species.