A comparative study of morphological and molecular diversity analysis among cultivated almonds (Prunus dulcis)

作者：Kadkhodaei S^*; Shahnazari M; Nekouei M Khayyam; Ghasemi M; Etminani H; Imani A; Ariff Arbakariya B

来源：Australian Journal of Crop Science, 2011, 5(1): 82-91.

• Agronomic traits
• almond
• genetic similarity
• microsatellite
• molecular marker
• Morphology
• phenotypic diversity
• Prunus
• SSR

In this study, a total of 39 morphological traits and 9 simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci were used (i) to study the morphological and genetic diversity among 53 selected almond (Prunus dulcis) cultivars/landraces with different geographical origins, (ii) to assess the level of correlation between phenotypic and nuclear genetic distance matrices, and (iii) to classify the accessions into groups based on molecular profiles and morphological traits. The analysis of the morphological data revealed significant differences among genotypes for all measured traits. The number of alleles per locus varied from 8 to 17 with an average of 12.86. The UDA-002 and UDA-005 markers were the most informative revealing 17 and 15 polymorphic alleles distributed among all genotypes, respectively, but considering polymorphism information content (PIC), UDA-023 was the most informative one. According to the results, the average values for number of effective alleles (5.59), Shanon index (1.97), expected heterozygosity (0.8) and PIC (0.89, ranging from 0.69 to 0.95) were relatively high. The mantel matrix correspondence test was used to compare the molecular and morphological similarity matrices. Although the correlation coefficient was low (r=0.02266, p=0.6926) but both morphological and molecular dendrogram clustered the genotypes into two main groups. The mean morphological similarity (0.59) was high in comparison to similarity calculated using SSR markers (0.23). The results will be useful for collections, conservation and various almond breeding programs.

• 出版日期2011-1