Evaluation of Genetic diversity in Iranian and Exotic wheat genotypes using SSR markers

Wheat is one of the oldest cultivated and the most important crop plant that has been used by humans. Success of any breeding program depends on the amount of genetic diversity. There are several methods to estimate genetic diversity such as pedigree, pattern morphological traits and molecular markers. This study was conducted to study genetic diversity among 35 bread wheat genotypes using SSR markers. Fifteen SSR primer pairs were used to explore the genetic diversity of the diverse population of bread wheat. The number of alleles observed by the fifteen markers were ranged from two to 11. The marker Xgwm190-5D had the highest number of alleles and the lowest number of alleles was associated with the markers Xcn13-6B. Average of observed alleles in the total of loci was 6/84. Wmc420 and BARC328 band amplification primers were not scored. Polymorphism information content (PIC) varied from 0.11 to 0.385 with an average of 0.22. The genetic diversity observed for the loci ranged from 0.107 to 0.357 with an average of 0.214. Based on similarity coefficients obtained from 0/90 to 0/98 percent showed similar values. The highest genetic similarity was found between genotypes from Turkey and Iran, and the lowest was observed between genotypes from Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on the results, the highest Cophenetic coefficient (r= 0/73) was observed when the Jacard method and UPGMA algorithm were used to create similarity matrix and to draw the dendrogram, respectively. Therefore, the dendrogram resulted of this method was considered for clustering. Cluster delineating the genotypes into four groups.