Garlic (Allium sativum L.) is one of the relevant strategic vegetable commodities in the world. Since garlic is a widely known sterile crop, developing new cultivars has relied mainly on clonal selection. Determining genetic variability among the local accessions of garlic is a vital step in a garlic breeding program. In the presented study, 14 local garlic accessions incurred evaluation for their genetic variability based on morphological traits and SSR markers. The results showed that local accessions displayed high genetic variability based on the morphological and molecular characteristics. Principle component analysis (PCA) indicated that 75.26% of total variation came from four PCs mainly determined by the traits, viz., plant height, number of leaves, leaf length, leaf width, degree of leaf waxiness, intensity of anthocyanin coloration at the base of the pseudo-stem, bulb diameter, leaf density, cross-section shape of leaf, and the shape of the basal plate. Molecular analysis based on 10 SSR markers revealed that high allelic variation (2-12 alleles) was evident among garlic accessions with an average number of 6.4 alleles, and the average polymorphism information content (PIC) value was 0.67 (0.32–0.88). Nine out of 10 SSR markers showed a PIC value >0.5, indicating that these markers were more informative for the genetic variability analysis of the garlic. The phylogenetic analysis also signified that the 14 garlic accessions could become two main groups with a 0.58 similarity coefficient. These results could benefit further selection and assist Indonesia’s future garlic breeding program.

Keywords: local accessions, genetic variability, molecular markers, homonym, clustergram

Key findings: We used morphological traits and molecular markers (SSR) to reveal that Indonesian garlic accessions collected from different geographical regions had high genetic variability. This finding would substantially contribute to the groundwork for forthcoming garlic breeding programs.