Ferula assafoetida is an herbaceous, perennial, and monocarpic species of Apiaceae family. The Ferula oleoresinous gum has had various food and medicinal applications from past to now. In traditional Asian medicine, the gum of assafoetida’s root had been prescribing as the regulator of the digestive system, cleaner and stimulator of intestinal villi, anthelmintic, expectorant, laxative, painkiller, and appetizing medication. The origin of F.assafoetida is the steppes of Iran and some parts of Afghanistan with an extended distribution. Despite the economic and medicinal importance of this plant, limited molecular studies has been done to assess the genetic diversity of assafoetida. In this study, assessment of genetic diversity within F.assafoetida populations was done using SCoT and SRAP molrcular markers which target expressible regions of genome. Nine SCoT primers and nine SRAP primer combinations was applied to assess the genetic diversity of 64 genotypes and amplified 211 and 194 bands, which showed 96.07% and 92.87% of polymorphism respectively. In order to investigating of primers efficiency in discerning of genotypes, polymorphic information content (PIC) was calculated, and it was 0.446 for SCoT primers and was 0.435 for SRAP primer combinations. The dendograms generated from Jaccard’s similarity matrix and the UPGMA method revealed genetic relationships among the F.assa-foetida genotypes. The highest cophenetic correlation coefficient of SCoT analysis was r=0.81 and the highest cophenetic correlation coefficient of SRAP analysis was r= 0.75 which relatively indicated the separation of populations. The analysis also revealed a relatively acceptable differentiation in allele frequencies that was equal to (Fst = 0.09) in SCoT analysis and it was equal to Fst= 0.07 in SRAP results, which illustrated high genetic diversity and gene flows among populations. High percent of diversity among populations indicates a rich resource of germplasm for breeding plans. Besides, the assessment of population structure demonstrated high rate of gene flows and mixture of populations, and it seems that Keywords : Ferula assafoetida , Genetic diversity, SCoT marker, SRAP marker, Total phenolic content
