Authors: S Yahiaoui Ernesto Igartua M Moralejo L Ramsay J L MolinaCano F J Ciudad J M Lasa M P Gracia A M Casas
Publish Date: 2007/11/17
Volume: 116, Issue: 2, Pages: 271-282
Abstract
The pool of Western Mediterranean landraces has been underutilised for barley breeding so far The objectives of this study were to assess genetic diversity in a core collection of inbred lines derived from Spanish barley landraces to establish its relationship to barleys from other origins and to correlate the distribution of diversity with geographical and climatic factors To this end 64 SSR were used to evaluate the polymorphism among 225 barley Hordeum vulgare ssp vulgare genotypes comprising tworow and sixrow types These included 159 landraces from the Spanish barley core collection SBCC plus 66 cultivars mainly from European countries as a reference set Out of the 669 alleles generated a large proportion of them were unique to the sixrow Spanish barleys An analysis of molecular variance revealed a clear genetic divergence between the sixrow Spanish barleys and the reference cultivars whereas this was not evident for the tworow barleys A modelbased clustering analysis identified an underlying population structure consisting of four main populations for the whole genotype set and suggested further possible subdivision within two of these populations Most of the sixrow Spanish landraces clustered into two groups that corresponded to geographic regions with contrasting environmental conditions The existence of wide genetic diversity in Spanish germplasm possibly related to adaptation to a broad range of environmental conditions and its divergence from current European cultivars confirm its potential as a new resource for barley breeders and make the SBCC a valuable tool for the study of adaptation in barleyThis research was funded by project RTA01088C3 granted by the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentación INIA of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and cofunded by the European Regional Development Fund Samia Yahiaoui was supported by a scholarship from the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional AECI of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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