Assessment of genetic diversity among wheat somaclonal variants lines using morphological traits and molecular markers

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to compare the application and utility of inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) techniques for analysis of genetic diversity among the somaclonal variants derived from the in vitro selection procedures and their parental plants, and to compare genetic diversity estimated using molecular markers with morphoagronomic traits. 27 bread wheat genotypes comprised two parental varieties (Gemmisa-1 and Sakha- 69), six somaclonal variant lines derived from the parental cultivar (Gemmisa-1) and 17 somaclonal variant lines derived from the parental cultivar (Sakha-69) and two local check varieties were used in this study. They were evaluated phenotypically and with molecular markers. All the dendrograms generated from standardized morpho-agronomic, ISSR, RAPD and the combined dendrograms (ISSR + RAPD + morpho-agronomic) data separated the 27 wheat genotypes into two main groups which diverged at similarity index of an average 0.479, 0.488, 0.501 and 0.282, respectively. In this study, positive moderate correlation (0.588 and 0.483) was found between agronomical traits and the two molecular markers (RAPD and ISSR markers, respectively) and very weak correlations were found between the other matrices.

Key words: Morpho-agronomic traits, wheat, Triticum aestivum L, molecular markers, ISSR, RAPD, genetic diversity, somaclonal variant lines.