Due to the importance of date palm production in Iran, introduction of new cultivars, improvement of current cultivars and studying the genetic diversity among available cultivars is essential for improvement the quantity and quality of date palm production. In this research, 15 different local genotypes of date palm collected from Saravan, Jalgh, Nahook and Sinokan regions of Sistan and Baluchistan province were used for diversity analysis. To this end, DNA was extracted from leaves
using Delaporta method and DNA quality and quantity were determined using spectrophotometer and 1% gel electrophoresis. PCR was performed using specific rbcL primers under determined conditions and the amplicons were sequenced. To study the relationships and genetic distances between genotypes, the results of sequencing were analy
zed and dendrogram of phylogenetic relationships as well as sequence similarity matrix were generated using Bioedit, and MEGA7 software. The results of the present study showed that there were a total of 553 different residues for this marker of which 505 residues contained deletion and addition, and 48 residues were without deletion and addition. The genetic distance ranged from 0.0 to 0.037 and the highest intra-regional diversity was related to cultivar Jm13_sabzoo. Based on the dendrogram obtained from cluster analysis, the studied cultivars were divided into two branches, in which the first branch contained cultivar Sabzoo from Jalgh region and the other cultivars were grouped in different sub-branches of second branch. Although the rbcL marker is useful for studying and recognizing diversity of intraspecific relationships,
a low genetic distance was estimated for the studied date palm genotypes. However, it is suggested that the other
DNA barcodes as well the other appropriate molecular markers could be used for future studies of date palm genetic diversity.