A comparative study between molecular and agro-morphological methods for describing genetic relationships in Tunisian faba bean populations

This study aimed to compare the genetic diversity of nine Tunisian faba bean populations by using 27 agro-morphological traits and sequence-specific amplification polymorphism (SSAP) markers. Results showed that faba bean populations exhibited a significant amount of variation for their agro-morphological studied parameters. Different populations were assigned into three groups based mainly on seed size. Furthermore, genetic variability among populations using SSAP markers showed that the average percentage of polymorphic loci for all population was 49.5% and the average Shannon’s diversity index was 0.21. The relationships between agro-morphological traits variation and SSAP markers variation were estimated using Mantel test. Experimental results showed low correlation between them (r=0.08). Therefore, these two techniques reveal different aspects of the diversity of faba bean, demonstrating that agro-morphological characters are not good markers for overall genetic variation and SSAP markers can resolve plant groups defined by visible traits.