Genetics and Molecular Biology (Mar 2007)

Association between genetic distances in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) as estimated by AFLP and morphological markers

  • Eduardo Alano Vieira,
  • Fernando Irajá Félix de Carvalho,
  • Ivandro Bertan,
  • Mauricio Marini Kopp,
  • Paulo Dejalma Zimmer,
  • Giovani Benin,
  • José Antônio Gonzalez da Silva,
  • Irineu Hartwig,
  • Gaspar Malone,
  • Antônio Costa de Oliveira

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1590/S1415-47572007000300016
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 30, no. 2
pp. 392 – 399

Abstract

Read online

Molecular and morphological data analyses matrices are very informative tools for the estimation of genetic distances. We used AFLP markers, morphological traits and combined analysis to estimate the genetic distances between wheat genotypes and ascertain any associations between the two techneques. Nineteen wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes were analyzed using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers and field evaluated for two years. The matrices obtained by morphological and molecular marker data analyses revealed a significant but moderate correlation (r = 0.47), indicating that such techniques sample distinct genome regions. The combined analysis was found to be highly correlated with AFLP (r = 0.97) and moderately correlated with morphological (r = 0.59) markers. A possible explanation for such results is a bias caused by the much higher number of AFLP (229) than morphological (17) markers. Thus, it is evident that the combined analysis is not efficient when a very dissimilar number of markers are used in each isolated technique. Therefore, to obtain a better knowledge of the degree of divergence among genotypes it is necessary to consider each analysis separately.

Keywords