FINGERPRINTING OF COMMON BEAN GENOTYPES

Progress in molecular genetic techniques provide us with new tools to characterize genetic diversity among organisms. These tools can be used for a variety of purposes: fingerprinting of cultivars; detection of duplicates in germplasm collections; characterization of population genetic structure of wild and landracc populations; monitoring of introgression of traits from exotic into adapted genetic backgrounds; and genetic linkage analysis. Here, we present some of these new tools and discuss their relative merits in characterizing genetic diversity.