Evaluating genetic diversity of some wheat genotypes using SSR and ISSR molecular markers

Due to the importance of genetic diversity especially the necessity to assess the diversity among wild relatives of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), the present study was conducted to evaluate the genetic diversity of 52 wheat genotypes (49 wild relatives genotypes of bread wheat along with three Iranian wheat genotypes) using 10 ISSR and two SSR markers. The results showed that a total of 12 studied markers produced 145 polymorphic bands with an average number of 11.4 and 15.5 polymorphic bands and 1.60 and 1.43 effective alleles for ISSR and SSR markers, respectively. The ISSR marker 17899A with the highest effective number of alleles (1.8), Nei’s gene diversity index (0.44) and Shannon’d diversity index (0.63) was the most valuable marker in this study. Cluster analysis method based on simple matching coefficient matrix and farthest neighbor algorithm grouped the studied genotypes into five clusters including 10, 6, 24, 9 and 3 genotypes, respectively, and the discriminant function analysis also determined the accuracy of this grouping to be 100%. The results of principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) also showed that the four most important principal components accounted for a total of 31.59% of the total variance. Grouping the genotypes using the first and second components with explaining 10.94 and 8.22% of the total variance, respectively, divided the genotypes into five groups, so that three Iranian wheat genotypes were placed into one cluster. In total, the results showed that the markers used in this study with acceptable polymorphism could be introduced as useful and desirable markers for evaluating genetic diversity and differentiation of wheat genotypes and possibly other cereals.