A Saeed - Department of Seed and Plant Improvement, West Azerbaijan Agricultural & Natural Resources Research Center, Urmia, Iran
H. Hovsepyan - Armenia State Agrarian University, Armenia
R. Darvishzadeh - Department of Agronomy and Plant breeding, Urmia University, Iran; ۴Institute of Biotechnology, Urmia University, Iran

A total of 64 reproducible and clearly scorable bands, produced from six primer combinations, wereassessed across the entire collection of 44 Cicer accessions. Of these, five were monomorphic and 58were polymorphic. The most informative primer combination was the E-AAC/M-CAG pair, whichproduced the largest number of polymorphic bands (14). Using metaphor agarose decresed the nonspecific bands in current AFLP study. Genetic variation was measured within each of the Cicerpopulations assessed. The most variable population was wild Cicers, C.reticulatum,C.echinospermum and C.oxyodon for which 46 polymorphic loci were detected among 7 accessionswith an overall gene diversity (h) of 0.3023. The dendrogram constructed by the UPGMA methoddemonstrated that six main sub groupings existed in the collection. Group I included two accessionsof C.oxyodon. Group II included an accession of C.reticulatum, two Flip's and two Sel's accessions.Group III included three genotypes, two accessions of C. echinuspermum and C.reticulatum andx2001TH 45. Group IX included three landraces a Sel's and an accessesion of C. echinuspermumamong them. The landrace of Mahabad as group X was placed between Group IX and XI. The lastgroup (XI) included three main sub groups. Eleven cultivated chickpea of Flip's, Sel's and ILC 3279were placed as second sub group. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) revealed that 9.5 % ofthe total variance was due to differences among populations and 90.5 % was due to differenceswithin groups.

Genetic variation, chickpea, wild species, AFLP