NUCLEAR RFLP BETWEEN PEPPER CULTIVARS (CAPSICUM-ANNUUM-L)

Forty one nuclear probes, distributed across the different linkage groups of the previously published map, were used to examine restriction fragment length polymorphism between cultivated peppers. Total DNA from thirteen accessions of Capsicum annuum var. annuum and one accession of C. baccatum var. pendulum was separately cut with ten restriction enzymes. The analyses were restricted to only one enzyme per probe to reduce the polymorphism redundancy. Nei & Li's genetic distances between accessions were calculated from the 141 resultant nuclear DNA restriction fragments. The genetic variation was larger between C. annuum and C. baccatum than between C. annuum cultivars. Large fruited related accessions closely clustered together. Distances between the small fruited cultivars were larger than within the bell pepper group. A correspondence analysis performed on differences between the global RFLP patterns of each accessions of C. annuum revealed the particular genomic structure of four small fruited cultivars: Criollo de Morelos 334, H3, Perennial and Doux Long des Landes. The percentage of probes revealing at least one RFLP with at least one enzyme ranged from zero to fifty percent for all the pairwise comparisons of C. annuum accessions. 82 presumptive loci were detected with a mean number of 1.46 alleles per locus within C. annuum and 1.83 within all the accessions. This result indicates that molecular markers will be more usable in intraspecific study of C. annuum than isozyme markers.