Evaluation of Genetic Heterogeniety among the Corn Landraces Collected from Farmer s Field

This paper describes the variations in cight agronomie traits in three unadpled local landraces and an inbred cultivar of corn. To compare the agronomic traits in field evaluation with molecular marker evaluation, the genotypes of the plant introductions were also checked by + microsatellite-SSR loci. The variations of the cight agronomic traits were higher in the local landraces than in the inbred line, which was substantiated by the high genetic variation in the landraces with microsatellite-SSR loci. The level of genetic variation was also different between landraces. Since the genetic evaluation can be easily quantified by the analysis of microsatellite-SSR loci, the threshold level of genetic homogeneity in the population for parental lines in breeding program can be determined and the effort of maintaining the landrace population would be alleviated. As an example in our analysis, the entry from Whachon should not need the same number of selfing generations as the other two landraces to get the level of inbred state, since this line showed lowest intra-genetic variation within the population.