Abstract

Iran has a rich and diverse pistachio germplasm and thereby, the diversity and number of Iranian pistachio cultivars is unique in the world. In this study, 31 pistachio cultivars and genotypes were characterized by random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), inter sequence repeat (ISSR) and simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The general dendrogram constructed using the combined data of the three sets of molecular markers was to some extent similar to those obtained separately with each marker. The overall principle coordinate analysis (PCA) based on genetic similarity matrices showed that the first three eigenvectors accounted for 28.46% of the total molecular variation. Therefore, the PCA results confirmed the results of cluster analysis .In SSR population analysis, the four primers produced 11 alleles among 31 pistachio genotypes with an average value of 2.75 alleles. 100% polymorphism was observed at all of these loci. The low average polymorphic information content value of 0.4374 indicated the presence of high genetic similarity among genotypes and entails development of additional polymorphic SSR primers for effective characterization of Iranian pistachio cultivars/genotypes. According to the effective multiplex ratio and assay efficiency index, it was shown that RAPD markers were the most powerful to differentiate the genotypes followed by ISSR and SSR markers, respectively.

Keywords: Pistacia vera, genetic diversity, clustering, population parameters.

Abbreviation

Abbreviations: PCR, Polymerase chain reaction; RAPD, random amplified polymorphic DNA; AFLP, amplified fragment length polymorphism; ISSR, inter sequence repeat; CTAB, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide; GS, genetic similarities;     PCA,     principle     coordinate      analysis; AEI, assay efficiency index; PP,percentage of polymorphic; EMR, effective multiplex ratio; Ho, observed heterozygosity; He, expected heterozygosity; PIC, polymorphic information content;n_e, number of alleles; GA, guanine-adenine; CT, cytosine-thyrosine; HWE, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium; I, Shannon information index.