EFFECT OF AGRONOMIC AND MOLECULAR INFORMATION ON THE GENETIC DIVERSITY OF PASSION FRUIT

Abstract

Genetic divergence study enables a better decision making for the choice of promising and more divergent genotypes for advancing selection cycles. As such, the goals of this study were to evaluate genetic diversity by means of agronomic and molecular traits and to investigate the genetic structure of a population of sour passion fruit, making it possible to select superior and contrasting genotypes. A total of 95 genotypes belonging to 20 half-sib families of sour passion fruit were selected. For molecular traits, 170 microsatellite (SSR) primers and 58 Inter Simple Sequence Reapeats (ISSR) primers were used. On the basis of this information, estimates of genetic diversity parameters, genetic distances, and grouping of genotypes were determined. Lastly,a joint analysis was performed with the groupings of agronomic and molecular information.
A differentiated structuring between phenotypic and molecular groupings was found. It was noticed the formation of five groups for phenotypic traits and three others for SSR and ISSR. The heterozygosity verified was greater than the expected, suggesting a significant number of heterozygous individuals. With respect to the joint analysis, it was verified an entanglement of 0.57 and 0.58, pointing out the divergence in the distribution of genotypes among the dendrograms. There was a greater genetic variability via phenotypic rather than molecular traits. With a view to continuing the breeding program, it is recommended the crossing of genotypes of groups 1, 2, and 5, which show good productivity, with genotypes via ISSR (23, 35, and 75) and SSR (6, 21, 26, 33, 38,
39, 52, 59, and 68).