Association between genetic distances in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) as estimated by AFLP and morphological markers

Abstract

Molecular and morphological data analyses matrices are very informative tools for the estimation of genetic distances. We used AFLP markers, morphological traits and combined analysis to estimate the genetic distances between wheat genotypes and ascertain any associations between the two techneques. Nineteen wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes were analyzed using amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers and field evaluated for two years. The matrices obtained by morphological and molecular marker data analyses revealed a significant but moderate correlation (r = 0.47), indicating that such techniques sample distinct genome regions. The combined analysis was found to be highly correlated with AFLP (r = 0.97) and moderately correlated with morphological (r = 0.59) markers. A possible explanation for such results is a bias caused by the much higher number of AFLP (229) than morphological (17) markers. Thus, it is evident that the combined analysis is not efficient when a very dissimilar number of markers are used in each isolated technique. Therefore, to obtain a better knowledge of the degree of divergence among genotypes it is necessary to consider each analysis separately.