Evaluation of genetic diversity in some drought tolerant and susceptible bread wheat cultivars using inter-microsatelite (ISSR) markers

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), with the highest planting area and production in Iran, is encountered with drought as one of the major environmental factor reducing grain yield. Genetic diversity of wheat cultivars is very important in reducing genetic vulnerability during plant breeding efforts. In order to estimate the genetic diversity, molecular markers provide excellent tools. Inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers were used to evaluate genetic variability among 26 bread wheat cultivars (15 tolerant and 11 susceptible). A total of 10 out of 21 tested ISSR primers produced polymorphic scorable banding patterns and were used to amplify wheat genomic DNA. One hundred and thirty three loci were scored, of which ninety two were polymorphic (0.92). The mean polymorphism information content (PIC) value was 0.37. The primers K13 and UBC 840 had the highest PIC value (0.40). Based on Jaccard’s similarity coefficients, the most genetic distances was between cultivars venak (resistant) and marvdasht (susceptible) while genetic distance between omid (resistant) and backcross- roshan (resistant) was the least. Dendrogram produced from minimum ward-based cluster analysis divided studied cultivars into two main groups. Results of the current study demonstrated that ISSR markers could be efficiently used to evaluate wheat genetic diversity.