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Bamboo is one of the most essential forest resources. Microsatellites have important role in genome, and are preferred over other molecular markers. For the first time, we exploited public transcriptome data of Dendrocalamus latiflorusfor identification and characterization of microsatellite markers in the species. Frequency of SSRs was found to be 1 per 4 Kb. Tri-repeats were found to be the most abundant (47.7 %). Among them, GC rich repeat motifs namely, CCG/CGG (24.18 %) and AGG/CCT (22.29 %) were predominant. 12,028 potential genic SSR markers were identified, of which, 92 % were class II type. A set of 21 functionally relevant markers were successfully validated in 5 accessions of D. latiflorus. Twenty markers were found polymorphic, with number of alleles and polymorphism information content averaging 4.8 and 0.452, respectively. Interestingly, 100 % markers showed cross transferability across 14 related bamboo species, and were utilized for establishing phylogenetic relationships. Genic SSR markers developed herein would assist in genetic diversity, evolutionary and association mapping studies in bamboo.

To assess genetic variation, 33 novel microsatellite markers were identified through nucleotide sequencing of enriched genomic libraries of Pteris cretica. Di- repeats (79.7 %) were found to be most predominant followed by tri (15.8 %), tetra (2.3 %) and hexa (2.3 %) type of repeat motifs. Evaluating these markers in six populations (N= 48) of Western Himalayan range detected average polymorphism information content (PIC) of 0.32. Combined neighbor joining (NJ) and principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) grouped all the populations in two major clusters with high levels of intermixing of accessions in each cluster. This suggests that P. creticapopulations of Western Himalaya have broadly been mixed with two sub-populations. High within population variance (98.7 %) and low genetic differentiation (Φst: 0.013), recorded in the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA). For the first time, highly polymorphic novel genomic microsatellite markers were identified and utilized for revealing genetic diversity of P. creticain Western Himalayan range in context of established hypothesis of genetic variations based on allozyme markers.