Genetic diversity of Bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.) landraces in Jordan assessed by Agro-morphological traits and Inter Simple Sequence Repeat markers

Bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.) is an important crop in Jordan, but it remains underresearched.The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the genetic variability existing among different bottle gourd landraces in Jordan using Agro-morphological traits and molecular markers.Bottle gourd landraces were collected from various locations in Jordan; phenotypic differences and genetic variation using ISSR were studied between collected landraces.Results show that phenotypic coefficients of variance were larger than their genotypic coefficients of variance for all characters, demonstrating that the environment had an impact on these features.High genetic advance was found for plant length, number of leaves, leaf width and seed area; this could be explained by additive gene action.High heritability >60% estimates were observed.Principal component analysis identified two principal components responsible for 69.6% of total variation.Plant height showed positive association with number of tendrils, number of leaves and leaf length.246 amplified markers were obtained using 24 ISSR primers, 135 of which were polymorphic.Genetic distance varied between 0.78 to 0.92 based on molecular analysis and ranged from 0.42 to 0.91 for agro-morphological data.Dendrograms constructed based on morphological and ISSR data clustered landraces to six and five main groups, respectively.The results of this work could be used in future bottle gourd breeding programs.