Study of genetic diversity among 17 populations of alfalfa (Medicago sativa) using cytogenetic and ISSR molecular markers

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is one of the most important forage crops because of high quality, growing extensively in farms and rangelands of Iran. Genetic variability is one of the most aspects for crop improvement. The experiments were carried out to determine genetic variability among 17 alfalfa populations based on ISSR and cytogenetic markers. All of the tested ISSR primers showed 44 visible bands. Three primers had the most number of bands while another primers showed the least band numbers. Mean percentage of polymorphism in the primers was 90.18 percent. Polymorphic information content (PIC) and marker index (MI) average were 0.36 and 1.88 respectively. Cluster analysis classified the populations genotype into four clusters. In order to investigate karyotipic variation between the populations, the populations were studied for several karyotipic characteristics. Including long arm, short arm and total length of the chromosomes, long arm to short arm and short arm to long arm ratios and total form percentage (TF%). All of the genotypes had 32 chromosomes. Analysis of variance of mitotic data in completely randomized design, showed highly significant differences between the studied genotypes for all of the studied traits (p