Assessment of Genetic Diversity of Silene (Caryophyllaceae) Species Using ISSR Molecular Marker

In the present work, we employed Inter-Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR), a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)- based system to evaluate the genetic diversity of thirteen species of Silene in Iran. Thirteen ISSR primers amplified a total of 207 DNA fragments, of which 204 (98.85%) were polymorphic. The obtained mean polymorphism information content (PIC) value was 0.88. Jaccard’s similarity coefficient ranged from 0.15 to 0.38 according to ISSR. Cluster analysis data revealed three main clusters. ISSR detected high polymorphism level and represented high genetic variation at interspecies level in Silene genus.