GENETIC DIVERSITY AND TAXONOMY OF PORTUGUESE TRONCHUDA CABBAGE AND GALEGA KALE LANDRACES USING ISOZYME ANALYSIS

Isozyme analysis was used to study the genetic variation and the genetic relationships of a collection of 48 Brassica spp. including 31 Portuguese coles (Brassica oleracea L.) accessions representative of the different landraces cultivated in Portugal. Other brassicas included in this experiment were Jersey kale, kailaan, common cabbages, broccolis, cauliflower, nine-chromosome wild brassica and turnip. Nine enzymes used in the starch gel electrophoresis included: PGM, PGI, AAT, LAP, TPI, FBP, SOD, IDH and GR. Twenty-one putative loci were revealed, with 3 showing invariance and the other 18 contained 50 alleles. The allelic frequencies at these loci represented by 40 plants per accession were used to calculate the following estimators of genetic variation: % of polymorphic loci, average number of alleles per polymorphic loci, average number of alleles per locus, and index of heterozygosity. The genetic relationships were evaluated considering Nei (1978) and Rogers (1972) genetic distances between each pair of accessions whose matrices were hierarchically clustered by the UPGMA method. The accessions were also studied using the principal coordinate analysis. Portuguese Tronchuda cabbages and Galega kales have shown high genetic diversity in comparison with the other accessions. This indicates their potential variation for use in breeding programs. The UPGMA results show that the 48 accessions, with the exception of B. iasularis, B. cretica, and turnip, can be clustered into 6 groups: (a) Portuguese Tronchuda cabbages, Galega kales and Algarve cabbages; (6) common cabbages and kales; (c) Couve Poda do Algarve and broccoli; (d) Algarve cabbage and common cabbages; (e) kailaan; (f) broccoli and cauliflower. The groupings obtained by the isozyme analysis are difficult to interpret considering the origin of the Brassica spp. and the morphological resemblance among the accessions.