ABSTRACT
Natural variability in the form of germplasm is one of the most important and basic raw materials at the disposal of the sugarcane breeders for meeting the future needs of crop improvement. India is the world collection of sugarcane germplasm and it is being maintained by the Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore. Sugarcane freely flowers and produces viable seed in the tropical climate of Coimbatore/Kannur, and the Sugarcane Breeding Institute is one of the two pioneers in sugarcane breeding in the world. In India, more than 6 million farmers are engaged in sugarcane cultivation, and the majority of them are small and marginal with very small land holdings. Sugarcane is an economically important, polysomatic, highly heterozygous, clonally propagated crop that accounts for more than 60% of the world's sugar production. Investigation of diversity within sugarcane cultivars using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) is shown that modern sugarcane cultivars are highly heterozygous with many distinct alleles at a locus.
