ASSESMENT OF GENETIC DIVERSITY IN GARLIC CLONES USING SSR AND ISSR MARKERS

Sixteen Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) and three Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR) primers were used to estimate the genetic diversity and its distribution in twenty garlic clones. A high level of polymorphism amongst studied clones was found with both SSR and ISSR markers. The total number of bands that were detected by all used primers was 75 including 6 monomorphic, 5 unique and 64 polymorphic. The percentage of polymorphism identified by SSR primers were varied between 33.3 and 100. However, all of the studied ISSR primers were polymorphic conferring a 100% of polymorphism. Results showed that each of the Asa14, Asa17, Asa18 and Asa59 primers generated one monomorphic band of 77, 120, 102 and 113 bp, respectively, in all of the studded garlic clones. Two monomorphic bands of 104 and 177 bp were generated by using Asa24 primer. Asa17 and Asa59 SSR primers produced only one unique band of 154 (Egaseed 2) and 646 bp (EGA 1), respectively. Two unique bands of 225 and 250 bp were detected for Egaseed 2 (ft) by using HB 13 ISSR primer. The highest similarity value (0.969) was found between AZO 2 and AZO 3, while the lowest value (0.482) was found between AZO 4 and EGA 5 clones. Dendrogram of genetic distances amongst all tested clones showed two distinct major clusters with overlapping. In general, the present results reveal the importance of using molecular markers to assess genetic diversity among such closely related genotypes which were difficult to distinguish with other markers.