Abstract
Pomegranate is an important fruit crop for human health. Plant genetic resources are vigorously used in tree fruit
improvement programs. Although Pakistan is rich in pomegranate genetic resources, yet it is a minor fruit crop in the
country. Keeping in view the breeding objectives, morphological and molecular diversity was estimated in 42 pomegranate
accessions using using 13 morphological traits of fruits and 29 SSR markers. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of fruit
length (mm), fruit diameter (mm), crown length (mm), hull thickness (mm), arils and seeds dimensions (mm) explained
93.9% of the total morphological diversity in first six principal components. Fruit weight and its dimensions was highly
diverse and correlated with each other in all accessions. Genetic analysis indicated average value of MAF, GD, HZ and PIC
as 0.5981, 0.497 0.404 and 0.425, respectively, in genomic DNA of selected accessions; moreover, primer POM_AAC1
proved highly polymorphic with maximum PIC value of 0.550. Minimum genetic similarity matrix value of 23.41 and
21.76% was measured in accessions of Chakwal and Muzaffargarh (CD2-MAN3), and Bahawalpur and Muzaffargarh (BR2-
MAN3), respectively. Polygenetic tree successfully clustered all the accessions and proved accession ‘BR2’ as highly diverse
and it did not cluster with any of the studied accessions. Most of the accessions having similar morphological traits, showed
dissimilarity for molecular relationship that stressed the use of molecular markers for germplasm characterization. Moreover,
morpho-genetic diversity in selected pomegranate accessions was very high which could be efficiently used in pomegranate
breeding programs.
