I intend to evaluate genetic and morphological diversity of maize local accessions from Tanzania, so as to identify accessions with drought tolerance traits. Now to achieve that point, I need to have primers for maize drought tolerance, and the right method, can any one help?
You can find some markers using some easy methods like RAPD-PCR or ISSR or using more accurate methods such as SSR
Article Molecular Markers for New Promising Drought Tolerant Lines o...
Dear Mujuni
I think that a good way to evaluate drought tolerance of a genotype is to grow it (or them) under control and drought conditions and then compare the relative growth rates for each genotype. You could also measure gas exchange if you have the equipment. A good indicator of drought tolerance is the response of transpiration to changes in soil water content. Comparing the water use efficiency (WUE) (photosynthesis/transpiration) would also give a good indication of the drought toolerance. Long terms responses are important in your case because some genotypes may seem to be tolerant on scales of days but things change on the long run.
I actually do not know about molecular markers and cannot judge their accuracy.
drought tolerance is a complex trait and evaluation of PCR markers present in some drought-tolerant genotypes may not correlate with properties of you local germplasm. Thus, physiologic test must be done first, and when you find good tolerant genotypes, you can study correlation with known markers or gene alleles. I would advice to look for allelic variation of drought tolerance genes. It will give more reliable and usefull results.
Dear Mujuni
Go for mRNA finger printing. what you should is grow your accessions in control as well as under drought conditions. After this you isolate mRNA at different stages from plants under controlled and drought exposed conditions. After this amplify these mRNA samples with any Random decamer primer available in your lab after this perform electrophoresis and compare the banding pattern in both control and drought exposed samples. if you find any different band in drought tolerance genotype as revealed by your screening experiments, just elute that band, sequence it and BLAST the sequence to find homology. From this sequence you can also design primers. Secondly you can also design primers from the sequences of genes responsible for drought tolerance.
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