The evaluation of Finnish heritage Narcissus accessions by genetic markers

Narcissus also called daffodil is a popular ornamental plant from Europe. It is known in Finnish gardens since 17th century, but there is no complete study on its genetic diversity. Over hundred years’ cultivation, it could happen the name of some accessions have been lost, localized or incorrectly assigned for a long time. In order to clarify the duplicates and support further genetic resource conservation, breeding program and other potential applications, the genetic diversity analysis of a set of N. poeticus and N. pseudonarcissus accessions was conducted by molecular markers. Genetic distance matrices between accessions were calculated by Dice dissimilarity coefficient and Gower’s dissimilarity coefficient, which was used to do cluster analysis and construct the dendrogram. Dendrograms of microsatellite data and ISSR data were draw by R program and based on unweighted pair group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA) to visualize genetic distance between accessions. We investigated genetic polymorphism of 3 microsatellite loci and 6 inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) loci in 164 accessions of N. poeticus, N. pesudonarcissus, their hybrids and unknown species. Despite 3 microsatellite markers were not specifically developed from N. poeticus or N. pesudonarcissus, they were detected reasonable informativeness with average genetic diversity value (GD) of 0.22 and 36 polymorphic alleles were amplified in this study. As for 6 ISSR markers, we observed more informativeness with higher average GD of 0.3 and 224 polymorphic alleles. According to pairwise similarity of accessions and microsatellite dendrogram, we found 18 groups of samples might be duplicates, 14 pairs of samples might be siblings and 4 pairs of samples could belong to same family. From the analysis of ISSR dendrogram, 51 pairs of samples were considered with close genetic relationship, but only 6 pairs might be duplicates, 44 pairs could be siblings and 1 pair could belong to the same family. Two core collections constructed by CoreFinder software consist of 24 accessions and 18 accessions respectively regarding to microsatellite data and ISSR data