Molecular variance and population structure of lentil (Lens culinarisMedik.) landraces from Mediterranean countries as revealed by simple sequence repeat DNA markers: implications for conservation and use

Abstract

The Mediterranean region has a rich history of domestication and cultivation of lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.). Landraces have been grown and repeatedly selected by local farmers under different agro-environments. Characterization of molecular variation and genetic differentiation helps to ensure enhanced valorization, conservation and use of these genetic resources. Nineteen Simple Sequence Repeat DNA markers were used for molecular variance analysis (AMOVA) and population structure assessment underlying 74 lentil landraces from four Mediterranean countries: Morocco, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Based on AMOVA, presence of population structure and genetic differentiation at different levels were evidenced. Genetic diversity among Turkish landraces was higher than that of other countries. These landraces were more homogeneous as shown by low genetic differentiation among individuals within each landrace. Whereas Moroccan landraces followed by Italian and Greek provenances showed higher diversity and differentiation among individuals within landraces. The wide genetic variability of these landraces could help to better adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. Moreover, they could provide useful alleles related to adaptive traits for breeding purposes. Based on structure analysis, we obtained indications of possible presence of two major gene pools: a northern gene pool composed of Turkish, Italian and Greek landraces, and a southern gene pool composed of Moroccan landraces. Our results could be of interest when designing future diversity studies, collection missions, conservation and core collection construction strategies on Mediterranean lentil landraces.

Multi-Level Characterization of Eggplant Accessions from Greek Islands and the Mainland Contributes to the Enhancement and Conservation of this Germplasm and Reveals a Large Diversity and Signatures of Differentiation between both Origins

“…Factors such as geographic isolation, island size, plant breeding system, or life form, and in the case of crop species, Agronomy 2019, 9,887 3 of 20 human factors, are shaping the difference levels [26,[29][30][31]. Characterization of the genetic diversity and population structure of landraces and local germplasm is very important to implement the most appropriate strategies for their collection, management, efficient conservation, and utilization as a source of variation in breeding schemes [32]. Several studies have focused on the characterization of eggplant genetic resources, including the cultivated species, commercial cultivars, and their most recognized wild relatives, from different regions of origin in order to identify desired genotypes for use in eggplant breeding programs [33][34][35][36].…”

GENETIC DIVERSITY IN LENTIL LANDRACES REVEALED BY DIVERSITY ARRAY TECHNOLOGY (DArT)

“…Grains of lentil are consumed as staple food and providing rich source of minerals, protein, carbohydrate and micronutrients (Toklu et al, 2009;Ates et al, 2016;Ates et al, 2018a). Therefore, enhancement of lentil production and consumption worldwide could decrease mineral malnutrition influencing majority of the world population (Idrissi et al, 2018). On the other hand, lentil cultivation provides carbon, nitrogen and organic matter to the soil by fixing atmospheric nitrogen (Ahamed et al, 2014).…”

“…The Mediterranean region including Turkey is well known for its species richness with "diversity hot spots" for different legumes including lentil (Maxted and Bennett, 2001;Idrissi et al, 2018). This region has a long history of lentil cultivation and domestication.…”

“…Farmers in this region selected lentil landraces due to adaptation to stress conditions (abiotic and biotic) over a long time period. Furthermore, owing to edaphic and climatic situations, a broad agro environment diversity occurs (Idrissi et al, 2018). Lentil landraces gathered from these various regions most likely have distinct responses to stress conditions and high genetic diversity (Idrissi et al, 2016;Idrissi et al, 2018).…”

“…Until today, many studies have been conducted on genetic diversity of lentil varieties, species and landraces utilizing several approaches, including physiological and morphological markers (Erskine and Choudhary, 1986;Erskine et al, 1989), isozymes (Erskine and Muehlbauer, 1991), storage proteins of seed (Sultana et al, 2006) and DNA based molecular markers such as restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) (Havey and Muehlbauer, 1989), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) (Abo-Elwafa et al, 1995;Ahmad et al, 1996;Ford et al, 1997;Ferguson et al, 1998;Sonnante and Pignone, 2001;Yuzbasioglu et al, 2006), amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) (Sharma et al, 1996;Toklu et al, 2009;Alghamdi et al, 2014), intersimple sequence repeat (ISSR) (Fikiru et al, 2007;Scippa et al, 2008;Toklu et al, 2009;El-Nahas et al, 2011;Seyedimoradi and Talebi, 2014), simple sequence repeat (SSR) (Jin et al, 2008;Babayeva et al, 2009;Kaur et al, 2011;Zaccardelli et al, 2012;Kushwaha et al, 2013;Dikshit et al, 2015;Idrissi et al, 2015;Idrissi et al, 2018;Tsanakas et al, 2018) and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) (Lombardi et al, 2014;Basheer-Salimia et al, 2015;Khazaei et al, 2016). On the other hand, Turkish lentil landraces which take a significant role in breeding offer rich genetic sources and farmers in Turkey still cultivated on a small scale landrace preferred for their ability of adaptation to regional environmental conditions (Toklu et al, 2009).…”