Assessment of genetic variation in an artichoke European collection by means of molecular markers

A core collection constituted of accessions from former germplasm collections present in Italy, France and Spain has been built up to have representative germplasm of all the four artichoke typologies, i.e. "Petit Violet de Provence", "Catanese", "Spinoso Sardo", "Romanesco". The core collection was analyzed at the molecular level in order to assess the diversity present, to measure thegenetic distance among accessions and to cluster them. Genomic DNA was extracted from 504 genotypes belonging to the artichoke germplasm collection and anlysed using various molecular markers typologies (i.e. ISSR, SSR, AFLP). The different markers were able to detect different level of polymorphism, in particular SSR where quite uniform between accessions while AFLP detected a much higher variation. The data obtained from all markers were scored and used to construct genetic distance matrices. Accessions were clustered based on their genetic distance. Moreover, discriminant analysis was run in order to detect the correct assignment of each genotype respect country of origin and artichoke typologies.