Molecular assessment of wild and cultivated Cicer species using ISSR markers

Abstract

Characterization of germplasm is one of the prerequisites for utilizing it in crop improvement programs and this requires understanding of genetic relationship between the wild and the cultivar genotypes. For this purpose, we investigated genetic relationships between 12 wild and cultivated accessions of chickpea using ISSR markers. ISSR amplification result shows 123 band out of the 250 bands i.e, (49.2%) bands were polymorphic. The dendrogram classified all twelve accessions into two distinct major clusters A and B, with about 21% of the similarity coefficient value. Based on 20 ISSR primers, Jaccard's similarity indices between pairs of accessions ranged from 0.119 to 1.00. UPGMA dendrogram revealed that the cultivar genotype ICC2210 (Kabuli) from Algeria and the wild genotype ICC17156 (Desi) from Turkey had the lowest similarity indices. According to Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the top three principal components, with Eigen values of 5.40, 3.35, and 2.61, are the most informative, accounting for 61.33% of overall genetic variation. All the accessions were divided into three groups, which covered seven (58.33%) of the total, although five (41.66%) were scattered on the plot. The PCA results resemble to the cluster and similarity coefficient analysis although some deviations have been observed. This information could be useful in breeding strategies for the improvement of chickpea accessions.