Genetic differentiation between generations of beech (Fagus orientalis Lipsky) populations in Caspian forests

Panmictic equilibria between generations do not occur in natural populations. Gene conservation programs in beech will preferably use seed material for the regeneration of resources. Therefore, knowledge of processes changing structures and amounts of genetic variation during generative stand reproduction becomes very important. In this study, at 10 beech population along the Hyrcanian forests, genetic composition of mother trees (at least 40 trees per population) and their progenies (7 seeds of each of the 10 mother trees) were determined by means of microsatellite markers. The allelic structure of mother trees and seeds indicated that all loci showed high polymorphism in all populations. Allelic multiplicity in the seed generation is generally higher than in mother trees, which indicate effective gene flow from neighbor stands. Number of frequent alleles (> 5%) dose not vary significantly, however, number of locally common alleles (≤ 25%) in seed generation was higher than mother trees. What is important that any regular deviations from the Hardy-Weinberg structures were not observed. In comparison with mother trees, we have detected a slightly reduction in genetic diversity, probably due to an inappropriate seed collection strategy limited to a few trees. These data suggesting an increasing the number of mother trees would be a guarantee for conservation of genetic diversity of beech.