Insights into the Evolutionary Genetic History of Pak-Turk Bottle Gourds [Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.]

Bottlegourd [Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl.], a member of Cucurbitaceae family (2n = 2x = 22) consisting of 90 genera and 750 species, is a monoecious, annual vine vegetable crop with soft pubescence. It is widely grown successfully throughout different geography of the world. Hundreds of accessions are grown showing morphological diversity in plants and fruits, even taste, color, aroma, flesh and juice percent is changed. Plants morpho-botanical traits are always changeable due to various ecological conditions. Various markers have made the genetic diversity clearer among and in between genotypes. SSR and Chloroplast markers are more efficient and reliable than ISSR, SRAP or AFLP markers. Here we have studied SSR analysis of bottle gourd accessions collected from various parts of the world Asia, Africa and USA. One part of this study has already been published, in present, we have added eight landraces collected from Pakistan and compared with the rest US genotypes that showed heterozygosity with other accessions in previous study. A total of 8 SSR primers and 2 Chloroplast markers were used to depict the genetic diversity. Per locus 2-11 alleles were produced. An unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean dendrogram was constructed. Pakistani landraces clearly showed a close genetic relation with US accessions, which depicts that these might have migrated from Asian origins. Despite geographical locations and morphological dissimilarities all bottle gourd accessions were genetically interrelated with each other with less genetic distance 0.1 among them. One of the landraces from Pakistan showed a heterozygosity character, which can lead to a new breeding approach in Turkey.