Genetic variation of some hawthorn species based on phenotypic characteristics and RAPD marker

Abstract

Hawthorn (Crataegus spp.) is an important forest fruit species in Iran. Genetic variability among some genotypes of hawthorn was investigated using morphological traits and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) marker. The collected genotypes belonged to four species of Crataegus genus. High variability among genotypes was found for most of the traits. Results from the principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that 85.05% of the observed variability was accounted by the first five components. The first two components explained about 55.24% of the total achieved variability. In PCA, fruit weight, fruit length, fruit diameter, fruit moisture, fruit dry matter, leaf length, leaf area, leaf width, number of leaves per node, seed weight and seed length were predominant in the first two components, indicating that they were useful for the assessment of hawthorn germplasm characterization. A total of 58 polymorphic bands were produced with 10 RAPD primers. The bands’ sizes ranged from 180 to 2700 bp. The number of the observed polymorphic bands for each primer ranged from 4 to 8, with an average of 5.8 alleles per locus. The polymorphism information content was observed to be the highest (0.79) in the Oligo_32 locus, whereas the Oligo_339 locus had the lowest value of 0.64, with an average of 0.72, among the RAPD primers. The Jaccard’s genetic similarity coefficient ranged from 0.12 to 0.95 among the genotypes. At a similarity coefficient of 0.46, the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) cluster analysis divided the genotypes into three major groups.