GENETIC DIVERSITY AND RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SALVIA SPECIES BY ISSR MARKERS.

Species identification is fundamentally important within the fields of conservation, biology, biogeography and ecology. Salvia species are herbaceous, biennial or annual, strongly aromatic. Inter-Simple sequence repeats (ISSR) molecular markers were used for evaluate genetic diversity and relationship analysis of 30 Salvia species. Ten selected ISSR primers amplified 116 loci, respectively, of which all were polymorphic. The obtained average polymorphism information content 0.39, average band informativeness 10.5 and the marker index 3.1 revealed high genetic diversity prevailing among Salvia accessions. The dendrogram was constructed based on ISSR separated the individuals into sub-clusters in accordance with their species. Our results indicated that ISSR markers can be used as a reliable and informative technique for evaluation of genetic diversity and relationships among Salvia species. The objectives of present study are: 1) can ISSR markers identify Salvia species, 2) what is the genetic of these taxa in Iran, and 3) to investigate the species inter-relationship? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]