Genetic Variability of Golden Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) Using RAPD Markers

Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) is one of the founding crops in Egypt agriculture is a diploid, annual plant species, which is mainly considered to be inbreed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the genetic relationship among three ecotypes of flax which may further assist in developing and planning breeding strategies for crop improvement programs. Nine RAPD primers were used for the analysis yielding 124 loci of which 53 were polymorphic. The range of polymorphism information content across three ecotypes in this study was from 7.14 to 64.29%. A dendrogram was generated based on the similarity matrix by the Un-weighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA), the three flax ecotypes were grouped in two major clusters. The first group I composed of two ecotypes 2 and 3 and the second group II contains one ecotype 1. RAPD technique is an effective technique in studying inter and intra-specific variation in flax.