Genetic diversity analysis of safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) accessions from different geographic origins using ISSR markers

Abstract

Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) is an oilseed crop with high quality vegetable seed oil. A set of 55 accessions from different geographical origins were introduced to constitute a breeding program germplasm. These materials were characterized by inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) as a simple method to reveal polymorphism among them. ISSR analysis was carried out with 13 primers. After agarose gels analysis, ISSR banding patterns were converted into binary data of presence-non presence and matrices were processed. Genetic distances between all pairwise combinations of the accessions were calculated using similarity of simple coefficient matching (SCM). Dendrogram of studied accessions was constructed using the UPGMA (unweighted pair group method arithmetic average) method. A high number of reproducible ISSR bands exhibited a high percentage of polymorphism (69.64%), indicating a high genetic diversity among the material studied. The lowest similarity coefficient was 0.462, observed between accessions 109 and 135, whilst the highest one was 0.962, observed between accessions 68 and 126, with an average of 0.726. Dendrogram similarity relationships revealed some clusters according to different genetic pools. The ISSR markers were very informative and exhibited a high level of polymorphism. The findings of this study would be useful for safflower breeding program in Morocco as well as in other countries of the world.