Study on genetic diversity between Erodium (Geranaiceae) species based on inter-simple sequence repeat markers

Identifying the accurate boundaries of a species is critical to have a better perspective of any biological studies. Therefore, species delimitation is a subject of extensive part of studies in the framework of biology. Erodium species possess significant pharmacological and biological activities. The whole plant was used as astringent and haemostatic in uterine and other bleeding Therefore, due to the importance of these plant species, we performed a molecular data analysis for this species. For this study, we used 60 randomly collected plants from 5 species in five provinces. Amplification of genomic DNA using 10 primers produced 52 bands, of which 50 were polymorphic (98.48%). The obtained high average PIC and MI values revealed high capacity of ISSR primers to detect polymorphic loci among Erodium species. The genetic similarities of five collections were estimated from 0.77 to 0.91. According to Inter-Simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers analysis, E. cicutarium and E. malacoides had the lowest similarity and the species of E. malacoides and E. oxyrrhynchum had the highest similarity. The aims of present study are: 1) can ISSR markers identify Erodium species, and 2) to investigate the species inter-relationship? The present study revealed that ISSR markers can identify the species