Agro-morphological and molecular characterization of the wild emmer populations from Turkey

In this study, Morphological characteristics of 176 genotypes of Triticum dicoccoides selected from the 38 populations collected from the three subregions (East-1, West-1 and West-2) of Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey were studied, and they were molecularly characterized by using SSR markers. The aim of the study was to determine genetics diversity among the populations as well as in the populations. The populations studied showed great variations in plant height, peduncle length, flag leaf length and area, length of the uppermost awn in the spiklet , awn length in the forth flower of the spikelet, length of the lowermost awn in the spikelet, length and width of the spikelet, length, width and heigth of the glume, length and width of the lemma, length and width of the palea, length and width of the anther and 1000 seeds weight. From the results related to the morphological data, it was concluded that the great variations determined among the populations could be used in the breeding programms. Allelic variations of 16 SSR primer pairs in the 176 genotypes of T. dicoccoides were examined. According to the results of the molecular data, the populations collected from the subregions East-1 and West-2 were genetically most distant (0.727) populations while the populations collected from the subregions West-1 and West-2 were genetically most similar (0.800) populations. According to the results AMOVA, there were a variation of 85 % among the all genotypes studied while the variation among the populations of the three subregions was 15 %. In the dendrogram obtained by using SSR data, the populations formed two main groups. Populations from the subregion of East-1 were in the first group, and the populations from the subregions of West-1 and West-2 were in the second group. From the dendrogram, it was appeared that the populations from the subregion of East-1 were genetically distant from the populations from the subregions of West1 and West-2. The populations from the subregions of West-1 and West-2 were genetically similar with each others.