Moisture stress greatly limits the productivity of wheat in many wheat growing regions of the world. Knowledge of the degree of genetic diversity among parental materials will facilitate the development of high yielding, stress tolerant wheat cultivars. The objectives of this study were: (i) use AFLPs to assess genetic diversity among bread wheat lines and cultivars with different responses to drought stress in two distinct environments and (ii) compare genetic diversity estimated by AFLPs with diversity evaluated on agronomic performance under drought stress. Twenty-eight genotypes, 14 from Iran and 14 developed or obtained by CIMMYT, were used in the study. Phenotypic data on the 14 Iranian lines were obtained in Iran, and data on the 14 CIMMYT lines were collected in Mexico. Ten AFLP primer pairs detected 335 polymorphic bands among the 28 cultivars. At the 51h fusion level of the resulting dendrogram, 6 genotypes clusters. were identified. Thirteen of the 14 CIMMYT genotypes grouped into one cluster whilst 4 of the remaining groups were comprised only of lranian genotypes. When the agronomic performance of the Iranian materials was compared with AFLPs, 5 out of 6 genotypes identified as being susceptible to drought and foni1ing the same cluster in the agronomic dendrogram, were located in the same cluster in the AFLP dendrogram. However, the drought tolerant Iranian materials did not show the same degree of relationship. The CIMMYT materials did not demonstrate a significant association between agronomic performance and genetic diversity determined using AFLPs. Clearly these data show that there are genotypes with similar agronomic performance and different genetic constitutions in this study that can be combined in a breeding program to potentially improve tolerance to drought stress.

Text in English

0407|AGRIS 0401|AL-Wheat Program