ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC DIVERSITY OF Smallanthus sonchifolius (Poepp. & Endl.) H. ROBINSON LANDRACES BY USING AFLP MARKERS

AFLP (Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism) analysis was carried out on Smallanthus sonchifolius to increase the knowledge on its genetic diversity. It is an ethnomedical and edible plant native of Peru and cultivated in many other countries. Thirteen landraces were analyzed by selected AFLP primer combinations generating a number of 185 fragments, of which 180 were polymorphic (97.00% of polymorphism). The mean value of fragments per primer combination was 37, but Msel (M)-CAG/EcoRI (E)-ACT primer combination reported the highest number with 63 amplicons, instead only 27 were revealed by M-CAG/E-ACC. The marker attributes such as resolving power (RP), marker index (MI) and polymorphism information content (PIC) were determined. RP values varied from 11.54 (M-CAG/E-ACC) to 27.54 (M-CAG/E-ACT), PIC ranged from 0.25 (M-CAG/E-AGC) to 0.28 (M-CAG/E-ACA), whereas MI values were found to be in the range from 6.18 (M-CAG/E-ACC) to 15.95 (M-CAG/E-ACT). Cluster analysis and PCA were evaluated for determining relationships among yacon landraces. We concluded that AFLP markers showed a highest efficiency in estimating genetic diversity in yacon despite to previous paper in which 3 times lower samples have been analyzed.