Yuca is a highlighted culture for the state of Pará, not only for its importance in the state's cuisine, but also for representing a source of income for thousands of agriculture producers. The culture can also give support to the state's agro-industry, by means of supplying raw materials used in the fabrication of many products. In order to be incremented in the state of Pará, the yuca culture needs to go through a genetic improvement program, in the hopes of obtaining material which is more adapted, more productive and with higher tolerance to diseases and plagues. Oriental Amazon Embrapa's germoplasm banks has 476 strains of yuca, including mandiocaba, macaxeira and wild yuca. This bank serves as a base to the culture's genetic improvement program, and in order to be better used, its molecular characterization is essential. The use of micro-satellite markers is recommended for this purpose, once it is a rather informative and polymorphic marker, being able to differentiate genotypes which are highly related.

Thusly, this project aims to molecularly characterize the entire collection of yuca strains by means of micro-satellite markers. Once the data generated through the process of molecular genotyping is available, the parameters of diversity will be estimated for the bank and for established groups of yuca types, and by their origins. The genetic differentiation will be verified among the groups, and parameters will be verified, such as allelic frequency, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, poly-morphic information content by spot, proportion of polymorphic spots, total and average number of rare alleles, genotypical and allelic richness. Also, it will be verified the measures of genetic identity between and within the groups, as well as observed measures of heterozygosity among and within the groups of yuca. From these measures, the differentiation among the groups will be estimated. F de Wright statistics will be calculated from measurements of heterozygosity.Obtaining the genetic dissimilarities and the construction of dendrograms will serve to identify duplicates, verify the relationship between the strains, and select promising genitors for cross-breeding.