Diversity of Common Bean Landraces Collected in the Western and Eastern Carpatien

The study of diversity in common bean was based on morphological and agronomical characteristics, differentiation of collected accessions by morphological and molecular markers, detection of genetic variation, and duplicates detection in bean landraces. The analysed 82 accessions of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) were collected in the Western andEastern Carpatien as landrace mixtures. Their seeds were segregated and pooled according to their characteristics; they were further multiplicated, and introduced into the collection. An extensive variation in plant and seed traits was discovered in thirty-three morphological and agronomical characteristics. Nevertheless, some of the accessions were identical in these characteristics. Cluster analysis grouped genotypes into two main branches, reflecting the growth type, seed size parameters, and thousand-seed weight. Molecular differentiation studies were performed by multilocus polymorphism detection in microsatellite and minisatellite DNA regions. Cluster analysis based on molecular data also grouped genotypes but no linkage to morphological traits was revealed. Bean accessions with very similar or identical morphological characters were clearly distinguished by DNA banding patterns. The presence of duplicates was excluded.