Abstract:

The genetic diversity of Eriobotrya was analyzed by ISSR markers. Twenty primers selected from 100 candidates were applied to the amplification which produced 436 bands. Of them 392 bands (89.9%) were polymorphic. The average effective number of alleles, Nei’s gene diversity and Shannon’s information index were 1.3, 0.208 5 and 0.332 3, respectively, suggesting that the accessions was comparatively great genetic diversity. There were 33 specific markers, but no specific markers for spring florescence or autumn-winter florescence were found. The spring florescence accessions could not be clustered to one group according to the dendrogram, suggesting that it might be inappropriate to use florescence as a criterion for the classification of Eriobotrya. The 41 loquat accessions could be divided into wild type and cultivated type with the similarity coefficient of 0.722, while the cultivated type could not be further classified according to a single trait. Based on the data, a discussion was made on the classification methods of Eriobotrya.

Key words: loquat(Eriobotrya), ISSR, genetic relationship, genetic diversity