Genetic relationship among introduced lentil germplasm using agronomic traits and ISSR markers

Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) is an annual, cool-season grain legume playing an important role in human and animal nutrition, as soil fertility maintenance. National lentil improvement program in Azerbaijan is currently focused on extending the genetic base of the lentil collection through the introduction of new breeding lines from ICARDA and involving them into breeding. The present study was aimed to evaluate the performance of lentil collection, mainly comprised of ICARDA-derived breeding lines for yield traits under Azerbaijan condition and assess genetic diversity among them using inter simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers. Many breeding lines of ICARDA exhibited agro-morphological performance superior to those of the local improved varieties. Our studies confirmed that the genetic base of the studied lentil collection is quite above board. A total of 71 bands were generated using 7 ISSR primers in 47 lentil genotypes, of which 62 were polymorphic. Genetic diversity values varied from 0.61 (UBC 848) to 0.95 (UBC 835), with a mean of 0.81. ISSR dendrogram was able to clearly distinguish all lentil accessions. Clear tendention was observed on clustering of genotypes according to their pedigree or origin with few exeptions. The results obtained from the Principal Coordinate Analysis were consistent with the results of cluster analysis, with minor differences. Breeding lines with high agronomic performance and sufficient genetic distance from this study can be used as appropriate parents to get more heterotic recombinants. This will accelerate the creation of new varieties well adapted to eco-geographic condition of Azerbaijan with stable and high yield.