GENETIC DIVERSITY IN LENTIL LANDRACES REVEALED BY DIVERSITY ARRAY TECHNOLOGY (DArT)

Abstract

Lentil is annual, autogamous and diploid (2n = 2x= 14) food legume with ~4 Gbp genome in size. Turkey is well known for its species richness with “diversity hot spots” for different legumes including lentil. In previous studies, various DNA markers were utilized but genetic diversity of lentil landraces have not yet been clarified. For this reason, present study aimed to identify genetic diversity of 94 Turkish lentil landraces utilizing 16,383 SNPs based on DArT technology. Results from “fastSTRUCTURE” analysis indicated that the unweighted pair group analysis with the arithmetic mean (UPGMA) dendrogram including a heat map and also principal component analysis (PCoA) showed that Turkish lentil landraces were classified into five main groups in current study, indicating the existence of a large genetic variation among landraces. Highest genetic variation was between geno34 and geno76 (0.9126) while the lowest genetic variation was between geno7 and geno1 (0.0104) and the average genetic variation among 94 lentil landraces was 0.63. The data obtained from current study can be utilized to increase genetic diversity of cultivated species and establish suitable conservation and breeding strategies of lentil.