RESEARCH ARTICLE Analysis of genetic diversity and relationships of wild

Abstract Genetic relationships and diversity of 45 Guizotia populations each consisting of ten individuals and belonging to five taxa of the genus Guizotia were analyzed using Inter Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) markers. Five ISSR primers generated a total of 145 scorable bands across the 450 individuals used for the study. The percent polymorphic loci for the taxa ranged from 68.2 (G. arborescens) to 88 % (G. scabra ssp. schimperi), with G. scabra ssp. scabra, G. zavattarii and G. villosa following G. scabra ssp. schimperi in this order with respect to the abundance of percent polymorphic loci. The Shannon-Weaver diversity indices (H0), for the five taxa also followed a similar pattern, with G. scabra ssp. schimperi exhibiting the highest H0 (0.7373) and G. arborescens the least (0.5791), while H0 for G. scabra ssp. scabra, G. villosa and G. zavattarii were 0.7313, 0.6620 and 0.6564, respectively. The least genetic distance (0.1188) was observed between G. scabra ssp. schimperi and G.villosa, revealing closer genetic relationships of the two species with each other than with the others, and the highest genetic distance (0.2740) was observed between G. scabra ssp. schimperi and G. zavattarii. The unweighted pair group method using the arithme-tic average clustering of the five taxa using the standard genetic distances produced two clusters, with G. scabra ssp. schimperi and G. villosa occurring in one cluster and G. scabra ssp. scabra, G. arborescens and G. zavattarii together in the other cluster. The study reveals that G. scabra ssp. schimperi is more closely related to G. villosa than to G. scabra ssp. scabra