English abstract
This study was conducted to characterize faba bean landraces, which is locally grown in Oman by using morphological and molecular markers. Since the variations in local faba bean still are not exploited and no description of the variation of this species is available. Twenty-five local faba bean accessions were studied in Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). The morphological study was carried out in the glass house of Agriculture Experiment Station at SQU, with optimum temperatures ranging from 22°C to 25°C. These accessions were from three regions of Oman; Dhakhilia, Batinah and Dhahira. The growth of random faba beans plants (thee plants/ accession) were observed and evaluated. The measurement was taken according to IBPGR Faba bean descriptors (1985) for eleven qualitative and ten quantitative traits. Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism technique was applied on the same faba bean accessions used for the morphological analyses. In addition, 10 international accessions from four countries; India, Pakistan, Yemen and Iran from the ICARDA collections were used in the study. The morphological study illustrated high levels of diversity of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics. Shannon's weaver index for qualitative traits averaged 0.73 and for quantitative traits the overall average was 0.72. On the other hand, AFLP methodology was successfully employed in this study for detection of molecular variation in faba bean landraces. Analysis of the 35 accessions using six EcoR1/Msel primer combinations generated amplification of 2435 total scorable band with the average of 405 bands per primer pair ranging from 344 to 475. The total percentage of polymorphism was from 95.84% to 98.11% with an average of 97.29%. A significant level of variation was detected in the overall level of diversity (Shannon's information index) on primer pairs ranging between 0.1509 and 0.2129. AMOVA analysis showed that genetic variance within faba bean accessions reached to 93.39%.
Overall, the results of both these methods (morphological and AFLP) successfully confirmed that the faba beans accessions are a highly varied and clustered without any definite pattern with regard to geographical origins.
