Selection of parental forage pea [Pisum sativum (L.)] genotypes based on morphological characterization and SSR markers for crossbreeding

Abstract In crossbreeding, the greater the genetic distance between the parental genotypes, the greater the genetic variation between the hybrids. In this study, genetic diversity among 23 parental forage pea genotypes was assessed by phenotypic and molecular characterization. For morphological characterization, unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) similarity dendrogram was generated using the following measurements: plant height (cm), number of pods per plant, number of seeds per pod, and number of seeds per plant. The dendrogram divided the pea genotypes into two main groups, each with two subgroups. For molecular characterization, 16 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were tested of which 14 markers were polymorphic and 2 markers were monomorphic among the genotypes. A total of 106 alleles were obtained and the number of alleles per primer was changed between 4 and 10 with an average of 7.57. The observed heterozygosity (Ho) was 0.00 for all SSR primers and expected heterozygosity (He) differed from 0.64 to 0.90 with a mean of 0.84. Polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranged from 0.55 to 0.87 and the average PIC value was calculated to be 0.78. The primers were found to be highly informative for peas genome. The similarity coefficient values between the genotypes ranged from 0.00 to 0.80. Both morphological and molecular research revealed significant variation among pea genotypes. In conclusion, both morphological and molecular research showed that there is significant variation among the genotypes and can be used as parents in further research.