Abstract

Pistacia vera L. is a widely represented plant in Algerian semi-arid regions. It is potentially used to restore degraded ecosystems. Genetic relationships among the cultivars was assessed by using six inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) primers.During the ISSR screening in this study, good amplification products were obtained from primers based on guanine-adenine (GA), cytosine-adenine (CA) and guanine-adenine-adenine (GAA) repeats. Primers based on cytosine-tyrosine (CT) and CAA repeats produced few large separate bands, so these primers were not selected for the final analysis (eliminated for the final analysis). This study shows that ISSR-PCR analysis is quick, reliable and produces sufficient polymorphisms for large-scale DNA fingerprinting purposes. The total of 111 bands of which 60 were polymorphic, (with 54.04%) was amplified by the six primers, an average of seven bands per primer. The total number of amplified fragments was between five to ten and the number of polymorphic fragments ranged from four to seven. The range of genetic similarity was from 0/84 to 1 and the constructed unweighted pair group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA), dendrogram classified the tested genotypes into two main clusters. This study shows that there was low genetic diversity among the tested cultivars and the ISSR-PCR analysis produced sufficient polymorphisms for large-scale DNA fingerprinting. This study reports the first application of the ISSR technique in characterization of Algerian pistachio cultivars original from Syria.

Key words: Pistacia vera L., genetic relationships, DNA extraction, ISSR, clustering.