Genetic Diversity and Clustering of Fourteen Wild Vicia Species from Iraq Revealed by SRAP Markers

Genetic Diversity and Clustering of Fourteen Wild Vicia Species from Iraq Revealed by SRAP Markers ALI TALEB AL-TAIE 1, AHMAD REZA GOLPARVAR1*, MUAZAZ AZEEZ HASAN2, MOHAMMAD REZA NADERI DARBAGHSHAHI1 1-Department of Plant Production and Genetics, Faculty of Agriculture, Water, Food and Nutraceuticals, Isf.C., Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran 2-Department of Biology, College of Education for Pure Sciences, Ibn-Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Iraq *Corresponding author’s email: ahmad.golparvar@iau.ac.ir Received: 10 November 2025 Accepted: 20 January 2026 ABSTRACT Study of wild species of Vicia to characterize genetic resources in Iraq is a critical step of conserving biodiversity and developing breeding and crop improvement programs. Sequence amplified polymorphism (SRAP) markers were applied in the paper to understand the genetic relationship between fourteen wild species of Vicia that are present in Iraq. The SRAP method provided 75 reproducible and fully polymorphic bands, an aspect that indicates the high discriminating capability of the method. In addition, the markers were efficient in separating the taxa examined with the content of polymorphism information (PIC) between 0.33 and 0.40. The values of genetic distance were calculated and had the range of 0.23 to 1.03 which demonstrated a significant amount of genetic difference and proved the actual divergence among the studied species. A clustering method of unweighted pair group average (UPGMA) was applied and yielded two major groups of species which a principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) based on 45.60% total genetic variance supported and conformed to known taxonomic structures. All these results allow testifying to the effectiveness of SRAP markers in breaking down complex genetic associations and providing a detailed molecular profile of Vicia genetic diversity, a fact that has, up to now, not been investigated in the realm of the molecular scale in Iraq.