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PRINT ISSN : 2319-7692
Online ISSN : 2319-7706 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcmas@gmail.com / submit@ijcmas.com Editor-in-chief: Dr.M.Prakash Index Copernicus ICV 2018: 95.39 NAAS RATING 2020: 5.38 |
In order to study the genetic diversity for a number of cultivars and ecotypes for Iraqi date palms (Phoenix dactylifera L.). Forty Iraqi well known cultivars from five different regions in Iraq were chosen. These including cultivars grown in some date palm stations belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture. The study included 14 morphological markers comprise trunk, leaf and fruits traits. Results indicated that the average number of alleles for all cultivars was 4.2. Shoot tip shape had seven alleles while fruit shield had only two. Major allele frequency ranged from 0.3 for fruit shape to 0.825 for fruit texture. Gene diversity was also ranged from 0.296 for fruit texture suggesting lowest polymorphism information content (PIC) value (0.265) to 0.771 for shoot tip shape suggesting highest polymorphism information content (PIC) value (0.742). Results of simple correlation among studied phenotypic traits reveled that highest correlation value reached 0.543 between the trunk size and leaf (fronds) length, followed by the correlation between trunk size and leaf base (0.540), while the lowest correlation was 0.012 between fruit stalk color and leaf base. Cluster analysis based on the Euclidean distances using UPGMA split selected cultivars into two main groups independently of their geographic regions with 6.9 Euclidean distance. The scatter diagram plot of the multivariate Principal component analysis (PCA) of the first two (PC1 and PC2) based on morphological markers revealed 31.86% of the variation among cultivars with Eigen value of 4.67 while PC2 was 17.93% with Eigen value of 4.63. Results of PCA scatter diagram exhibit the same clusters as shown in the dendrogram.