Study of Genetic Diversity in Iranian Pistachio Cultivars with Inter- microsatellite ISSR Markers

Pistachio is one of the most important horticultural crops of Iran. The best way to have high yields is genetically pure and monogenous gardens. Thereby, study of genetic diversity makes this possible to have homogenous gardens with high performance genotypes. In the present study, the genetic diversity among nineteen cultivars was assessed using inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR) primers. The survey was done by 20 ISSR primers, out of them 10 with polymorphic bands was selected for genotyping. With 10 ISSR primers, 114 DNA fragments (loci) were produced that 73 of them (64.03%) were polymorphic. The mean of polymorphism information content (PIC) for the primers was ranged from 85% to 91%. The genetic similarity matrix was constructed using Jaccard coefficient. The genetic distance was ranged from 0.53 (low similarity) between kale- ghochi, hosein-khani and ebrahim-abadi up to 0.83 (high similarity) between kale-ghochi and ahmad-aghai. Based on cophenetic correlation coefficients, the best Clustering dendrogram was constructed by unweighted pair group method using arithmetic average (UPGMA). Cluster analysis revealed three main groups with 2, 4 and 13 pistachio varieties in each group. The present study showed that the use of ISSR markers for investigation on genetic diversity and providing genetic identifications of different Iranian pistachio cultivars could be useful and informatics.