Comparative Analyses of the Genetic Diversity among European Spelt and Wheat Accessions with AFLP, RFLP and SSR Markers

The genetic relationships among 17 European spelt and bread wheat accessions of known pedigrees representing a wide range for baking quality were investigated using separate cluster analyses based on 149 amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs), 114 restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) and 175 single sequence repeat (SSR) polymorphic bands. Similarity matrices revealed that the average genetic similarity between genotypes was equal to 0.59 and 0.58 using RFLPs and AFLPs, respectively. A lower value (0.28) was obtained with SSRs due to the higher variability of SSR loci. The correlation between similarity estimates was equal to 0.74 for both AFLP-SSR and RFLP-SSR comparisons and to 0.78 for the AFLP-RFLP comparison. The partial differences observed among the RFLP, AFLP and SSR dendrograms are likely due to the fact that the three marker classes explored partially distinct regions of the wheat genome.