APPLICATION OF RAPD AND ISSR MARKERS TO ANALYSES MOLECULAR RELATIONSHIPS IN AZERBAIJAN WHEAT ACCESSIONS (TRITICUM AESTIVUM L.)

To estimate genetic relationships of 33 wheat accessions originating from different regions of Azerbaijan Republic, RAPD and ISSR analysis was performed with 22 and 20 primers, respectively. The most discriminating primers were OPG -20, OP H-01, OP E-02 and OPG -08 for RAPD and ISSR-8, ISSR-11, ISSR-19 for ISSR which showed the highest values of genetic diversity. A high level of polymorphism was found with both RAPD and ISSR markers, and the mean genetic diversity values were 0.789 and 0.863 for RAPD and ISSR markers, respectively. In RAPD analyses, 319 out of 374 bands (84.89%) were polymorphic. The number of alleles ranged from 8 to 30 per primer, with an average of 17 per primer. In ISSR analyses, a total of 350 alleles were detected, among which 318 alleles (90.85%) were polymorphic. The number of alleles per primer ranged from 10 to 26 with an average of 17.5 alleles per ISSR primer. Cluster analyses indicated that both RAPD and ISSR markers could distinguish all 33 wheat accessions. Although the analysis of RAPD and ISSR markers could successfully be used to investigate the genetic diversity of the wheat accessions, the ISSR markers were superior to RAPD markers in the capacity of revealing more informative bands in a single amplification. In addition, ISSR analyses are more specific than RAPD analyses, due to the longer SSR-based primers with higher primer annealing temperature, which enable higher-stringency and greater band reproducibility amplifications.