NUCLEAR RFLP BETWEEN PEPPER CULTIVARS (CAPSICUM-ANNUUM-L)

Forty one nuclear probes, distributed across the different linkage gro ups of the previously published map, were used to examine restriction fragment length polymorphism between cultivated peppers. Total DNA fro m thirteen accessions of Capsicum annuum var. annuum and one accession of C. baccatum var. pendulum was separately cut with ten restriction enzymes. The analyses were restricted to only one enzyme per probe to reduce the polymorphism redundancy. Nei & Li's genetic distances betwe en accessions were calculated from the 141 resultant nuclear DNA restr iction fragments. The genetic variation was larger between C. annuum a nd C. baccatum than between C. annuum cultivars. Large fruited related accessions closely clustered together. Distances between the small fr uited cultivars were larger than within the bell pepper group. A corre spondence analysis performed on differences between the global RFLP pa tterns of each accessions of C. annuum revealed the particular genomic structure of four small fruited cultivars: Criollo de Morelos 334, H3 , Perennial and Doux Long des Landes. The percentage of probes reveali ng at least one RFLP with at least one enzyme ranged from zero to fift y percent for all the pairwise comparisons of C. annuum accessions. 82 presumptive loci were detected with a mean number of 1.46 alleles per locus within C. annuum and 1.83 within all the accessions. This resul t indicates that molecular markers will be more usable in intraspecifi c study of C. annuum than isozyme markers.