Assessment of genetic variation in a collection of lentil using molecular tools

A collection of lentil landraces, mostly from Italy, but including Mediterranean and foreign germplasm as reference, was evaluated using RAPDs, microsatellite-primed PCR and ISSRs. A low level of useful polymorphic bands was detected with the former two markers, whereas ISSRs revealed a higher degree of variation. The UPGMA trees, based on Jaccard similarity index matrices, obtained with RAPD and ISSR respectively, did not produce similar clusters. However, in both cases, the accession which differentiated the most from the others was from Ethiopia, a country where also other cultivated species have shown a remarkable degree of variation. On the other hand, Italian accessions showed a trend to group together. ISSR markers proved to be useful for distinguishing closely related genotypes, and possibly for substantiating the genetic peculiarity of ecotypes applying for the obtainment of origin and quality marks.