MOLECULAR GENETIC IDENTIFICATION OF SOME WHEAT GENOTYPES

Abstract

Wheat represents one of the major sources of food all over the world and the most important cereal crop in Egypt. Wheat proteins quality is generally recognized as the most important factor affecting bread making. Although there is a strong and direct relationship between total flour protein content and loaf volume, the slope of this relationship depends on the inherent quality of different wheat cultivars (Jerry et al., 2003).
In Egypt, improvements of wheat yield and grain quality, modification of its plants architecture and increasing its tolerance to drought and lodging and resistance to insects and pathogens are being done properly. Many wheat cultivars have been produced. The ability to discriminate between such cultivars is a fundamental to the operation of the modern seed industry and seed trade as the basis of modern crop production.
The biochemical genetic fingerprinting can be considered as a good tool for characterization and genetic evaluation of the conserved material (Cardy and Beversdorf, 1984). Therefore, biochemical genetic fingerprinting would satisfy both adequacy and accuracy for the characterization of the conserved material. Furthermore, electrophoretic method is considered a rapid and accurate test to identify and characterize species. It is now possible to determine a fingerprint for each species to distinguish its identity and its properties by the use of appropriate and techniques. Cultivar identification and the techniques to asses cultivar purity are essential for commercial seed production and crop certification.
Sodium dodecyl sulfate - poly- acrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS- PAGE) is the most widely used technique in protein studies. It is considered a low-cost, reproducible, and rapid method for quantifying, comparing and characterizing of proteins.
Isozymes electrophoresis has been successfully applied to many organisms from bacteria to numerous animal and plant species since 1960s (May, 1992). The studies have encompassed various fields (e.g., physiology, biochemistry, genetics and breeding) and purposes (population structure, mating system, hybridization, polyploidy and systematic) Murphy et al. (1990).
El-Ghubashy (2009) used the electrophoretic methods of storage grain proteins to identify ten wheat genotypes of storage grain proteins and water soluble protein. He reported that some genotypes contained specific bands which could be used to identify and characterize them among others.
The aim of the present investigation was to identify ten wheat genotypes using electrophoretic methods of isozymes and soluble and insoluble proteins.