Sugarcane is the most important sugar and bioenergy crop in the world. The selection and combination of parents for crossing
rely on an understanding of their genetic structures and molecular diversity. In the present study, 115 sugarcane genotypes used for
parental crossing were genotyped based on five genomic simple sequence repeat marker (gSSR) loci and 88 polymorphic alleles of
loci (100%) as detected by capillary electrophoresis. The values of genetic diversity parameters across the populations indicate that
the genetic variation intrapopulation (90.5%) was much larger than that of interpopulation (9.5%). Cluster analysis revealed that
there were three groups termed as groups I, II, and III within the 115 genotypes.The genotypes released by each breeding programme
showed closer genetic relationships, except the YC series released by Hainan sugarcane breeding station. Using principle component
analysis (PCA), the first and second principal components accounted for a cumulative 76% of the total variances, in which 43%
were for common parents and 33% were for new parents, respectively. The knowledge obtained in this study should be useful to
future breeding programs for increasing genetic diversity of sugarcane varieties and cultivars to meet the demand of sugarcane
cultivation for sugar and bioenergy use