Genetic diversity among melon (Cucumis melo L.) accessions revealed by morphological traits and ISSR markers

Abstract

The genetic relationships among 48 melon (Cucumis melo L.) genotypes collected from various parts of Azerbaijan were determined by comparing their phenotypic and molecular traits. Eleven agromorphological traits and 10 polymorphic inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) primers were used to define the genetic diversity. Principal component analysis grouped the agromorphological traits into the first four axes, describing 78% of the total variations. The highest genetic variation coefficient was found for yield per hectare (20.32%) and for fruit length (17.35%). Calculated heritability for yield was 0.96. The analysis of morphological traits grouped the accessions into four clusters. The 10 ISSR primers yielded 35 polymorphic alleles, representing 85.4% of all the amplified loci. The average genetic diversity index determined was 0.70. The highest and the lowest similarity indexes were equal to 0.97 and 0.36, respectively. The 48 accessions were grouped into 10 clusters based on ISSR markers. Correlation between distance matrices based on agromorphological traits and ISSR markers was not statistically significant (r = 0.012).