Evaluation of Morphological Diversity of Different Ecotypes of Amygdalus scoparia Spach: A Medicinal Plant Resistant to Hard Environmental Conditions

Amygdalus scoparia Spach is a potentially multi-purpose wild almond species and a perennial medicinal plant which belonging to Rosaceae family where grows naturally in arid and semi-arid areas of Iran. In the current investigation, genetic variation of five ecotypes of A. scoparia from Hormozgan and Fars provinces, including Bekhun, Homag, Sekhuran, Sarvestan and Fasa, was evaluated using morphological markers. 10 important characteristics such as sub-branch length, number of secondary branches on the sub-branch, number of flowers on the sub-branch, dry weight of sub-branch and percentage of dry weight of sub-branch were investigated. The results of variance analysis showed that significant differences (p≤0.01, 0.05) were found among the studied A. scoparia natural ecotypes for studied traits. The ecotypes of Homag, Sekhuran and Bekhun had the highest values of the important breeding traits including the sub-branch length, the number of secondary branches on the sub-branch, the number of flowers on the sub-branch, the dry weight of sub-branch and the percentage of dry weight of sub-branch. The results showed that ecotypes had a wide variation in terms of all studied morphological attributes. The correlation coefficients between evaluated traits showed significant positive and negative correlations between some important traits. PCA analysis results illustrated that studied characteristics divided in three groups which justified 64.01% of the total variance. Hierarchical cluster analysis identified three major clusters with several sub-clusters. The results of this investigation highlighted the efficiency of translation initiation codon polymorphism for genetic characterization and accurate authentication of A. scoparia ecotypes as well as detecting and tagging morphologically important traits in this species that would be helpful for implementation of effective conservation strategies and even broaden current genetic diversity.