This study was conducted during the period from 2014 to 2016 at Kaha Vegetable Research Farm, Qalioubiya Governorate, ARC, Egypt to assess genetic variability and heritability for fresh yield, seed yield, seed oil yield and related traits in seventeen Egyptian rocket landraces collected from different regions of Egypt. Results showed that estimated broad-sense heritability showed high values and the large portion of phenotypic variance (σ2p) was due to the genetic variance (σ2g) for the traits leaf area, fresh yield, seed yield, seed oil percentage, seed oil yield, antioxidant activity and total phenols content. Therefore, these characters can be improved through selection based on phenotypic observations in early segregating generations in rocket germplasm. From this study, it can be concluded that L4 and L13 were the best landraces with respect to fresh yield, seed yield, seed oil yield and reasonable oil characters. AFLP (The Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism) fingerprinting was applied to a group of rocket landraces to find if there is any geographical differentiation in rocket diversity from Egypt. The high level of polymorphism within rocket landraces and the high number of landraces-specific bands suggest that AFLPs are powerful markers for diversity analysis in rocket landraces. Region-specific AFLP markers were found (present in landraces from the same origin and absent in others). AFLPs generated data show that the highest genetic similarity value to be 99.8% and the lowest value to be 82.7% with an average of 91.25%. Based on AFLP analysis, the highest similarity percentage (99.8%) detected by the AFLP assay was between L1, L2, L3, L9, L11, L12 and L13 all of them share the same genetic background and geographical region since they were collected from the nearby regions in Egypt. While the lowest percentage of similarity (82.7%) was detected between L8 and L17 landraces. The UPGMA dendrogram revealed two distinct clusters corresponding almost to the geographical origin of the landraces in Egypt. |
