Env Exp Biol (2012) 10: 49–56

Morphometric and amplified fragment length polymorphism marker analysis in some landrace wheat (Triticum aestivum) genotypes collected from north-west Iran

Abstract

Wheat (Triticum aestivum) is one of the most important food staples in Iran. Understanding of the genetic variability among landrace wheat germplasm is important for breeding. The aim of this work was to characterize sixty landrace wheat accessions collected from north-west Iran, and to assess mutual genetic distances by use of morphometric and AFLP markers. In morphometric trait assay, results of variance analysis and descriptive statistics indicated that the genotypes differed significantly for all of the traits, and indicated considerable diversity. A dendrogram was constructed from morphological traits. The genotypes were grouped into two clusters, between which the mean Euclidian distance was 4.77. Twelve AFLP primer pairs detected 128 polymorphic bands among the sixty genotypes. The mean polymorphism rate based on AFLP data was 31%; however, wide polymorphism among primer pairs was observed (22 to 40%). Polymorphic information content, calculated to assess the informativeness of each marker ranged from 0.28 to 0.4, with a mean of 0.37. Five distinct clusters were obtained by using the un-weighted neighbour-joining method with arithmetic means analysis. In this study, the landrace genotypes did not demonstrate significant association between agronomic performance and genetic diversity determined using AFLPs. Clearly the study showed that there are genotypes with similar agronomic performance and different genetic constitutions. This information can be used to protect intellectual property and for breeding and selection programmes.