Discussion
Despite the interest devoted to Orobanche spp. given their tremendous economic impact, knowledge of their genetic variability is still limited. Genetic diversity analysis is of great importance as it will facilitate understanding the genetic structure of parasitic weed populations. This knowledge will provide insights into parasite dispersal, host specialization, development of new races, and in establishing diverse collections of parasite races for use in crop breeding programs (Román et al. 2002; 2007b; Vaz Patto et al. 2008). However, accurate genetic diversity studies require powerful and reliable genetic tools, such as molecular markers.
Throughout the last two decades, several studies attempted to elucidate patterns of genetic variation of Orobanche spp. using different molecular markers such as RFLP (Vaz Patto et al., 2008 on O. foetida ), RAPD (Bouhadida et al. 2015; Román et al., 2007b on O. foetida ), ISSR (Román et al., 2002 on O. crenata ), SSR (Pineda-Martos et al. 2014 on O. cumana ), SSR-SNP (Calderón-González et al. 2019 on O. cumana ), and SRAP (Ennami et al., 2017a on O. crenata ). In recent years, genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), has become an ideal tool for plant breeding and plant genetics studies (Chung et al. 2017). To the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies on genetic variability ofOrobanche spp. using GBS. Our work is therefore the first to use this approach for broomrape, generating 2,935 high-quality SNP markers that provided substantially higher resolution relative to earlier approaches. In the present study the genetic diversity and population structure of 10 O. crenata populations originating from different locations and crop hosts in Algeria were analyzed by GBS-SNPs.