Discriminating durum wheat cultivars using highly polymorphic simple sequence repeat DNA markers

The winter type durum wheat varieties of Anatolia used in this study were differentiated for the first time by using simple sequence repeat (SSR) DNA markers or microsatellites. Seven microsatellite markers were used to distinguish four well‐adapted landrace selections, five cultivars and seven recently obtained advancing lines. The loci of seven microsatellites were all homozygous, but the WMS6 locus occurred with two alleles in all the genotypes. The genotypes were all distinguished from each other, with the number of alleles ranging from five to 13. The lowest and highest polymorphism information content (PIC) values were observed to be 0.609 and 0.872, respectively. Three markers alone, WMS6, WMS30 and WMS120, can distinguish all 16 genotypes. UPGMA dendogram, based on a similarity matrix by a simple matching coefficient algorithm, is in accordance with the available pedigree information.