EN
Genetic diversity in the germplasm of flowers is a key to genetic improvement of ornamental species. Gerbera cultivars are grown commercially worldwide and their flowers are durable and appealing, having a wide variety of colors. Genetic diversity based on molecular analysis can provide useful information for germplasm management and varietal characterization. In this study, we used start codon targeted (SCoT) and conserved DNA-derived polymorphism (CDDP) to assess the genetic diversity among 22 gerbera cultivars. Our findings showed that average polymorphism information content (PIC) was 0.39 and 0.40 for SCoT and CDDP markers, respectively, indicating that the studied markers were equal in terms of assessing genetic diversity. The results of clustering for both marker systems grouped the genotypes into three clusters. We found a positive significant correlation (r = 0.73, P < 0.01) between similarity matrix gained by both SCoT and CDDP markers. Cluster analysis for the CDDP and SCoT markers grouped the cultivars in three clusters. Average Marker index (MI) for SCoT and CDDP was calculated 3.40 and 2.45, respectively. This is the first time that the efficiency of SCoT and CDDP markers, as a novel method, have been compared with each other to evaluate genetic diversity in a set of gerbera genotypes. Our results showed that the comparison of different genetic diversity estimation methods could be useful for the improvement and crossing of gerbera genetic resources. This information can be used for the selection of superior genotypes for gerbera breeding programs.