Datasets for genetic diversity assessment in a collection of wild and cultivated pomegranates (Punica granatum L.) by microsatellite markers

Data described in this article refer to molecular characterization and assessment of genetic diversity within a wide collection of pomegranate genotypes including both selections and cultivars from different geographical origin/disseminations by using microsatellite (SSR, Simple Sequence Repeats) markers. Supplied datasets refer to a set of 63 genotypes including 55 accessions (landraces) from Italy, Turkmenistan, Japan, and USA and 8 cultivars from Israel, established at the pomegranate repository of the Fruit Tree Unit of the Department of Soil, Plant and Food Science at University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy. Pomegranate accessions differed for end-use purpose (edible, ornamental) and some morpho-pomological traits including juice taste, inner tegmen hardness, and skin/seed color. Molecular data were opportunely employed to build a similarity matrix to establish phylogenetic relationships (genetic similarity and distances) among pomegranate accessions and compare genetic clustering to morpho-pomological classification. The present data article provides detailed information and methodological protocols on SSR markers, PCR amplification and banding profiling aimed to molecular characterization of pomegranate collection. This latter was conducted by amplifying a set of informative polymorphic SSR markers on the genomic DNA of each pomegranate accession, and then comparing the different molecular profiles by capillary electrophoresis. The banding patterns obtained from microsatellite markers were used to build a binary matrix containing the scores for each individual SSR fragment, which was transformed into a similarity matrix and finally used for cluster analysis and dendrogram building based on the UPGMA algorithm. This paper supplies data potentially useful for the identification of polymorphic markers suitable for varietal identification and traceability, or discrimination between tightly related pomegranate accessions with very high morphological similarity and/or geographical identity. Data described in this paper support the published original research article titled “Exploiting DNA-based molecular tools to assess genetic diversity in pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) selections and cultivars” [1].