A Comparative Study of Genetic Diversity in Wheat Variant Lines Based on Morphological Traits and ISSR and RAPD Markers

This investigation was conducted to study the application and utility of Inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR) and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) techniques for analysis of genetic diversity among the somaclonal variants derived from the in vitro selection procedures and their parental plants, and to compare genetic diversity estimated using molecular markers with morpho-agronomic traits. Twenty seven bread wheat genotypes comprised two parental varieties (Gemmisa-1 and Sakha-69), six somaclonal variant lines derived from the parental cultivar (Gemmisa-1) and seventeen somaclonal variant lines derived from the parental cultivar (Sakha-69) and two local check varieties were used in this study. All generated dendrograms from standardized morpho-agronomic, ISSR, RAPD and the combined dendrogram (ISSR + RAPD + morpho-agronomic) data separated the twenty seven wheat genotypes into two main groups which diverged at similarity index of averages 0.479, 0.488, 0.501 and 0.282, respectively. Positive moderate correlations (0.588 and 0.483) were found between agronomical traits and the two molecular markers (RAPD and ISSR markers, respectively) and very weak correlations were found between the other matrices.