Chrysanthemum (Dendranthema grandiflorum Ramat.) is a member of the Asteraceae and 588 varieties obtained Plant Variety Protection and 601 varieties were registered to Korea Seed & Variety Service for marketing. Thus, chrysanthemum is one of the important horticultural crop and having a possibility for infringement of Plant Breeder’s Rights. We investigated the genetic relationship of 20 chrysanthemum varieties using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. A total 335 SSR primer sets were screened for identification of 20 varieties. With 335 SSR primers, seventeen SSR primers showed polymorphism and reproducibility between 20 varieties. A total of 77 polymorphic fragments were identified by 17 SSR markers. Two to eight SSR alleles were detected for each SSR locus with an average of 4.53 alleles per locus. The polymorphism information content values ranged from 0.408 to 0.825 with an average of 0.45. Genetic distance of 20 varieties ranged from 0.36 to 0.73 by unweighted pair-group method with arithmetical average based on Jaccard’s distance coefficients. All of twenty varieties were distinguished by 17 marker genotypes. Future work will be investigated to construct DNA profile database for large number of chrysanthemum varieties using DNA sequencer.

• Eun-Jo Shim(Testing Division, Korea Seed & Variety Service, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs)
• Moo-Kyoung Yoon(Testing Division, Korea Seed & Variety Service, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs)
• Jee-Hwa Hong(Testing Division, Korea Seed & Variety Service, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs) Corresponding Author