Evaluation of DNA polymorphism among cultivated and wild grapevine accessions from Azerbaijan

To estimate genetic relationships among 31 cultivated and 34 wild grape accessions originating from regions near the Caspian Sea in the Azerbaijan Republic, RAPD analysis was performed with 27 decamer primers selected from a total of 55 primers. The most discriminating primers were OPC-16, OPF-18 and OPA-17, which showed the highest values of genetic diversity (0.927, 0.914 and 0.909, respectively). The lowest values of diversity pertained to the markers OPA-1 (0.615) and V-20 (0.624). The cluster analysis representing genetic similarity among all selected samples divided the genotypes into nine separate groups at similarity index 0.508. Within the studied Azerbaijan grape populations the highest genetic diversity belonged to the population of cultivated samples originating from the Absheron peninsula, with a diversity index 0.852 and the next ranks were assigned to the wild populations originating from Nabran and Guba regions, with a diversity index 0.824 and 0.793, respectively. The lowest diversity was observed within Davachi individuals, with a diversity index 0.765. The wild population from Azerbaijan was molecularly similar to the cultivated gene pool from this area. This result supported the hypothesis that the southwest of the Caspian Sea is a region where grape was brought into culture. During the analysis a special band was observed which could be used in identifying wild and cultivated grape accessions with high or low resveratrol content. The results of this work clearly indicated that the RAPD analysis can be used to estimate genotypic similarities, genetic diversity and for clustering cultivated and wild grape accessions.