Identification of synthetic oligonucleotide probes revealing polymorphism in Phaseolus lunatus L.

Twenty two accessions, including wild and cultivated representatives of the Mesoamerican and Andean gene pools and intermediate forms of Lima bean were included in this study. It could be shown that five repetitive motifs, namely (AAT)5,(ATG)5, (GACA)4, (GATA)4, (GGAT)4, were able to give clear-cut bands when used as probes and to reveal high levels of variation. The highest resolving power was revealed by the (AAT)5 probe, which was able to detect even inter-individual polymorphisms. Therefore, oligonucleotide fingerprinting has proved to be a useful tool to analyse geneticdiversity in Lima bean.