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.