Morphological Diversity among Some Pistachio Genotypes in Rafsanjan

In order to study of genetic diversity among male and female pistachio genotypes, 30 male pistachio trees and 8 female pistachio trees from Iranian Pistachio Research Institute (IPRI) in 2009 year located in Rafsanjan were used for data recording. Fifteen morphological characters (4 qualitative and 11 quantitative) were evaluated based on IPGRI descriptor. Pollen germination percentage in artificial media was varied from 56.25 % in MK3 to 96.4 % in MS20. Results from simple correlation analysis showed that flower bud fresh weight, flower bud length and width correlated positively with leaf length, width and terminal leaflet length and also length and width terminal leaflet correlated negatively with number of leaflet. Factor analysis was used to determine the effective characters and the main factors. Five factors with coefficient higher than 0.60 were defined that contributed to 81.45% of total variance, and characters with the highest factor loading were considered as significant. Flower bud characteristics were consisted 23.93 of total variance. Pistachio genotypes were clustered based on five factors and at similarity distance of 20, they were divided into four main-clusters. The results of present study showed that there was high genetic diversity between studied male genotypes morphological characteristics were useful for identification of pistachio genotypes and determine of genetic diversity.