Genetic Relatedness among Wild and Cultivated Almond Genotypes Using RAPD Marker

In this experient, RAPD markers were used to evaluate the genetic relationships among 36 Iranian, European, American and Russian almond cultivars and three wild Amygdalus species. Sixty10-mer primers were used which totally created polymorphism 47 primers, which produced reproducable banding patterns, were used for further analysis. A total of 918 polymorphic RAPD bands were selected omong of 968 bands. Regarding the dendrogram and similarity matrix, it was concluded that the genetic similarity value among studied cultivrs and genotypes was low and the genetic variation among them was relatively high. Similarity index among the studied cultivars varied between 0.29 and 0.89 with mean of 0.53. The maximum and minimum similarity observed between Monagha and Sefid (0.89), and A. scoparia with Sangi28 geneotype (0.29), respectively. Cluster analysis was computed based on Jaccard similarity coefficient using UPGMA method and the resulting clusters were represented as dendrogram extracted from the showed dendrogram, 47 polymorphic primers discriminated among all the cultivars and species. The resulting dendrogram divided the cultivars and species into two clusters (at 0.50 similarity values) with American Thompson cultivar, two Sangi genotype and two Amygdalus species as the most distant from the group. Cluster analysis of similarity data grouped the cultivars according to their geographic origin and or their pedigree information. Iranian, European and American cultivars were clustered into three separate groups.