The objective of this study was to evaluate the genetic diversity among traditional common bean accessions through morphological descriptors and molecular markers. Sixty-seven common bean accessions from the Germplasm bank of the Instituto Federal of Espírito Santo—Campus de Alegre were evaluated. For this, 25 specific morphological descriptors were used, namely 12 quantitative and 13 qualitative ones. A diversity analysis based on morphological descriptors was carried out using the Gower algorithm. For molecular characterization, 23 ISSR primers were used to estimate dissimilarity using the Jaccard Index. Based on the dendrograms obtained by the UPGMA method, for morphological and molecular characterization, high genetic variability was observed between the common bean genotypes studied, evidenced by cophenetic correlation values in the order of 0.99, indicating an accurate representation of the dissimilarity matrix by the UPGMA clustering. In the morphological characterization, high phenotypic diversity was observed between the accessions, with grains of different shapes, colors, and sizes, and the accessions were grouped into nine distinct groups. Molecular characterization was efficient in separating the genotypes in the Andean and Mesoamerican groups, with the 23 ISSR primers studied generating an average of 6.35 polymorphic bands. The work identified divergent accessions that can serve different market niches, which can be indicated as parents to form breeding programs in order to obtain progenies with high genetic variability.

Population growth and the high demand for food production has caused environmental degradation losses in biodiversity. The conservation of genetic resources is the most appropriate strategy for maintaining the variability of species of great importance, such as Capsicum. In this study, we describe the characterization of 69 pepper accessions of four Capsicum species from different regions of Brazil on the basis of qualitative and quantitative descriptors and ISSR markers. The 11 quantitative descriptors grouped the 69 populations into five clades. The fruit traits had the greater discrimination power. A strong correlation was detected between some pairs of quantitative descriptors: petiole and fruit length, fruit diameter and fresh fruit mass, leaf length and leaf width, canopy and plant height, stem diameter and plant height, stem diameter and canopy diameter. A negative correlation was also observed between plant height and pericarp thickness. Moreover, the molecular analysis grouped accessions into five clades. The morpho-agronomic and molecular characterization were efficient to estimate the genetic diversity between accessions, being important tools for the knowledge and use of accessions. This study is of great importance to preserve pepper germplasm and to provide data to facilitate the process of the selection in breeding programs.

The present work aimed to characterize and evaluate Capsicum peppers in the South of the State of Espírito Santo, in order to estimate the variability among the accessions for the Germplasm Bank implementation. For this, 33 genotypes were collected through donations in four municipalities in the region. The genotypes were characterized based on nine quantitative descriptors: number of seeds per fruit (NS), number of fruit locules (NL), number of fruits per plant (NFR), plant height (PH), leaf width (LW), leaf length (LL), fruit length (FRL) and fruit diameter (FRD). Analysis of variance and means grouping by the Scott-Knott test was performed (P=.01). To estimate the diversity, the Tocher method was realized. The GT Biplot analysis was performed with using RStudio program to estimate discrimination, representativeness and correlation of characteristics. It was found a great diversity among the studied genotypes, being able to emphasize the accession Ifes 01 and Ifes 03 as the most divergent ones. The Tocher grouping allowed the formation of seven groups. The biplot analysis presented the formation of three groups of characteristics. The access Ifes 01 stood out for the group of characteristics FRL, NS and FRD. The Ifes 32 accession was highlighted for the PH and DC characteristics group, and the Ifes 20 accession was highlighted for the group formed by the NFR characteristic. It was observed that the characteristics that contributed the most to the divergence of accessions were PH and DC, and the most representative characteristic was DC. So, it’s concluded that there is great variability among the genotypes collected, presenting great phenotypic variation for the nine characters studied. In addition, some accesses were promising for plant breeding programs, pointing to gains in the various segments of the peppers market, which shows the importance of the collections of the producers in the South of Espírito Santo.