CROP WILD RELATIVES

ABSTRACT: Germplasm collections are valuable gene pools providing diverse genetic material that may be applied for the improvement of cultivars and advanced agronomic productivity. An assessment of genetic and genomic diversity within these collections can be used to assign lines and populations to diverse groups; to study the evolutionary history of wild relatives; to verify pedigrees and fill in the gaps in incomplete pedigree or selection history, to monitor changes in allele frequencies in cultivars or populations and to help narrow the search for new alleles at loci of interest. Towards the application of genetic diversity analysis to Brassica germplasm improvement, we are characterising genetic diversity between 28 species and wild relatives of Brassica from an international germplasm collection, using 60 Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) molecular markers. Results on the SSR polymorphism and phylogenetic relationship among species and wild relatives of Brassica will be presented.