iPBS-Retrotransposon Markers in the Analysis of Genetic Diversity among Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Germplasm from Türkey

Beans are legumes that play extremely important roles in human nutrition, serving as good sources of protein, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. In this study, we tried to elucidate the genetic diversity and population structure of 40 Turkish bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) local varieties and 5 commercial cultivars collected from 8 different locations in Erzurum-Ispir by using inter-primary binding site (iPBS) retrotransposon markers. For molecular characterization, the 26 most polymorphic iPBS primers were used; 52 bands per primer and 1350 bands in total were recorded. The mean polymorphism information content was 0.331. Various diversity indices, such as the mean effective allele number (0.706), mean Shannon’s information index (0.546), and gene diversity (0.361) revealed the presence of sufficient genetic diversity in the germplasm examined. Molecular analysis of variance (AMOVA) revealed that 67% of variation in bean germplasm was due to differ-ences within populations. In addition, population structure analysis exposed all local and commercial bean varieties from five sub-populations. Expected heterozygosity values ranged between 0.1567 (the fourth sub-population) and 0.3210 (first sub-population), with an average value of 0.2103. In contrary, population differentiation measurement (Fst) was identified as 0.0062 for the first sub-population, 0.6372 for the fourth subpopulations. This is the first study to investigate the genetic diversity and population structure of bean germplasm in Erzurum-Ispir region using the iPBS-retrotransposon marker system. Overall, the current results showed that iPBS markers could be used consistently to elucidate the genetic diversity of local and commercial bean varieties and potentially be included in future studies examining diversity in a larger collection of local and commercial bean varieties from different regions. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.