Evaluation of Genetic Diversity in some Iranian Sweet Cherry Cultivars Using some Morphological Characteristics and RAPD Markers

Several sweet cherry genotypes are growing in different parts of Iran. In this study, a comparison was performed between clusterings based on 26 morphological characteristics of fruits and leaves, and molecular marker data derived from 23 RAPD primers in 23 Iranian sweet cherry cultivars along with a foreign cultivar as a control. In some cases, there was good agreement between both clusterings. However, in many cases, they did not approve each other, as the correlation between distance matrix of morphological characteristics and similarity matrix of RAPD marker data was not significant (r=0.22). The reason for disagreement between these matrixes can be related to lack of sufficient morphological data. The clustering based on RAPD marker data was in good agreement with previously reported results in incompatibility studies on some of used sweet cherry cultivars. In this study, the value of calculated polymorphism was 81.7 percent for 23 primers. Furthermore, the paired similarity coefficient varied from 0.43 to 0.81. Results showed a high variability among studied Iranian sweet cherry cultivars and RAPD was an effective maker for studying sweet cherry genetic diversity.