Molecular markers are extensively used in human, plants and animals for basic and applied studies such as fingerprinting, allelic intergression, selectio of useful traits and construction of genetic maps. One of the most important key items for future plant breeding is genetic maps . A linkage map is a genetic map of a species or experimental population that shows the position of its known genes or genetic markers relative to each other in terms of recombination frequency, rather than as specific physical distance along each chromosome. Linkage mapping is also critical for identifying the location of genes that cause genetic diseases and shows the location of gene loci including the morphological, isozyme, protein and DNA markers along the chromosomes of living species. In plant breeding genetic maps with high genome coverage are becoming increasingly useful in both basic and applied researches. Genetic linkage maps serve several purposes including localization of interest genes , facilitating marker-assisted breeding, map-based cloning and QTL mapping. Iit of considerable advancement in genetic map construction in several economically important plants, such as rice, maize, sorghoum and wheat, there is limited studies in safflower. The objective of this work was to construct a genetic linkage map of safflower based on Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA ( RAPD) markers. Safflower is a diplpid (n=12), thistle –like member of the family Compositea that thrives in hot., dry climates. It is one of humanity oldest crops and has been traditionally grown for the production of fabric dyes and food coloring, as well as for medicinal purposes. Today safflower is cultivated mainly for it is seed, which is used for birdseed, animal feed meal, industrial application and most importantly edible oil production. RAPD primers can quickly generate a large number of scorable loci per single assay and generally give significant coverage of the genome without DNA sequence information. The population used in this research was an F 2 population of 117 progeny plants derived from a cross between cultivated Carthamus tinctorius L. genotype C 111 and a wild accession from C. oxyacanthus species, genotype ISF 2 . The DNA from the two parents and individual F 2 plants was extracted following CTAB method. Sixteen RAPD primers out of a set of 91 that showed polymorphism in parental genotypes were used on F 2 plants. These primers produced 81 bands in which 49 of them showed normal monogenic segregation of 3:1 in the F 2 generation. The linkage analysis was carried out using the 49 markers with normal segrigation and 39 of them fromed six linkage groups spaning a total length of 1225/5 cM at LOD score of 3 and a maximum distance of 50 cM using MAPMEKAR/EXP Ver 3.3.
