Discriminating durum wheat cultivars using highly polymorphic simple sequence repeat DNA markers

The winter type durum wheat varieties of Anatolia used in this study were d ifferentiated for the first time by using simple sequence repeat (SSR) DNA markers or microsatellites. Seven microsatellite markers were used to disti nguish four well-adapted landrace selections. five cultivars and seven rece ntly obtained advancing lines. The loci of seven microsatellites were all h omozygous, but the WMS6 locus occurred with two alleles in all the genotype s. The genotypes were all distinguished from each other, with the number of alleles ranging from live to 13. The lowest and highest polymorphism infor mation content (PIC) values were observed to be 0.609 and 0.872, respective ly. Three markers alone, WMS6, WMS30 and WMS120. can distinguish all 16 gen otypes. UPGMA dendogram, based on a similarity matrix by a simple matching coefficient algorithm, is in accordance with the available pedigree informa tion.