engleski

Molecular aspects of Iberian grass pea germplasm diversity

Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) is a feed, food and fodder crop, with great adaptability to inauspicious environments (drought, flood and salinity), high protein content and resistance to serious diseases. It is one of the most promising sources of calories and protein for the drought-prune and marginal areas of Asia and Africa, being an alternative to marginal soils and for cropping systems diversification in Europe. Nevertheless, genetic erosion danger exists caused by a regressive pattern of use. The CRF-INIA (Spain) maintains and ex-situ collection of Iberian grass pea accessions. With the present work we assessed the genetic diversity of a collection of 48 Iberian grass pea accessions using AFLPs and compare it with their morphological (passport data) and disease resistance to Erysiphe pisi and Uromyces pisi (percentage of leaf coverage by mycelium). UPGMA cluster analysis, based on 568 AFLP markers, distinguished all the accessions with no clear clustering. Likewise, no clear groups were visible on the PCA based on 16 quantitative morphological traits. Furthermore, the correlation between the molecular and the morphological distance matrices was not significant. The pattern of genetic variation among the grass pea accessions grouped into disease resistance classes (susceptible/partial susceptible and partial resistant) was analyzed using AMOVA. However, non-significant phi-values among classes suggested that there is no genotypic differentiation. Also none of the AFLP markers scored showed significant correlation with the disease resistance data. These findings support the joint use of molecular and morphological traits to exploit properly the natural diversity within this collection. AFLPs showed to be effective in discriminating and identifying associations among accessions and the studied Iberian collection showed to maintain a high diversity and potential for resistance improvement. These accessions may not only represent a valuable source of interesting genes for the development of modern grass pea cultivars but also for the closely related genera breeding.

Lathyrus sativus; plant genetic resources; AFLP; disease resistance; morphological traits

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