Abstract

Genetic diversity of 58 Mahaleb cherry (Prunus mahaleb) genotypes and six sweet cherry (P. avium) accessions was studied using 25 cpSSR primer pairs. Thirteen out of them demonstrated two to four alleles with an average of 2.46 alleles per primer pair. The mean of PIC value for the primers was 0.32. The average values of expected heterozygosity (He) and Shannon’s information index (I) for all loci were 0.35 and 0.55, respectively. The dendrogram based on cpSSR markers has been illustrated by MEGA4 software with Maximum Composite likelihood model and the Neighbor-joining method, which clustered the genotypes into four groups. Sum of first three principal components analysis (PCAs) could be represented most of (63.07%) the total variation in the original dimensions and confirmed the results of cluster analysis. Based on the AMOVA results, the allele numbers among groups and species studied in this research were more than those observed within them. In this study cpSSR markers provided a good tool for assessment of genetic diversity among and within mahaleb cherry and sweet cherry genotypes.

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