Genetic Diversity between and within Lilium Species and Hybrids Revealed by ISSR Markers

Genetic variation and relationships among 22 Lilium accessions including 14 wild species and 8 hybrids were examined by using inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers.Among 100 primers used for PCR amplification of genomic DNA, 10 primers (10%) generated polymorphic DNA fragments.A total of 148 ISSR fragments were generated from 10 primers, 97.97% of which were polymorphic among the 22 Lilium accessions.The genetic variation revealed by ISSR markers indicated that 22 Lilium accessions showed high polymorphism, abundant genetic variation, and the genetic diversity within wild species was higher than that within hybrids.Cluster analysis based on ISSR data by Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Means (UPGMA) showed that 22 Lilium accessions could be placed in two groups with a similarity ranging from 0.4459 to 0.9392.This revealed that wild species were genetically distant from hybrids, and was basically consistent with the results of traditional classification based on morphological characters in Lilium.The results of this study revealed that molecular techniques might be helpful or even necessary to the precise classification of Lilium and the necessity of further study on the genetic relationships between wild Lilium species and hybrids.At the same time, the results also revealed that L. wenshanense might be of great value to new variety breeding of Lilium.This study will provide the basis for the systematic study and the rational utilization of Lilium germplasm resources.