Genetic variation and structure of maize populations from Saoura and Gourara oasis in Algerian Sahara

BACKGROUND: The ability of maize populations/landraces to tolerate drastically extreme environments over the past four centuries in Algeria leads to characterize these genetic resources for germplasm management as well as the identification of the best landraces useful for genetic improvement. Thus, the aim of the present work was a fingerprinting of an Algerian maize collection (47 landraces) from Saharan oasis by using 24 agro-morphological traits and18 Simple Sequence Repeats to evaluate genetic diversity and population structure. RESULTS: Phenotypic traits showed large significant variation in which earliness, plant size, ear and kernel features and crop yield appeared the most discriminant traits among landraces by using principal component analysis (PCA). One hundred ninety-seven different alleles were detected with a high mean number of allele per locus (10.9). The selected SSR were highly informative with PIC values > 0.65 as well as an overall genetic diversity (0.47) highlighting a broad genetic variability in the analyzed landraces. Genetic structure analysis revealed a high genetic differentiation among the 47 maize landraces with an overall Fst value (0.33). Cluster analysis for morphological traits as well as for SSR markers grouped the 47 Algerian populations regardless their geographic origin. CONCLUSIONS: Maize from Algerian desert harbors a wide genetic diversity offering a source of novel/unique alleles useful for maize breeding programs to face the ongoing and future major challenge, the climate changes. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12863-018-0655-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.