Although the first inhabitants of western Amazonia domesticated pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes Kunth, Palmae) or peach palm for its fruits, today it is widely planted for its heart-of-palm. Like other domesticates, pejibaye presents a complex hierarchy of landraces developed before the conquest of the Americas. The existence of three landraces (Pará, Solimões, Putumayo) was proposed along the Amazonas and Solimões Rivers, Brazil, based on morphological characteristics. There are some questions remaining about the intermediate landrace being an artifact of the morphometric analysis. AFLPs were used to evaluate the relationships among samples of these putative landraces. DNA was extracted from 99 plants representing 13 populations maintained in the Pejibaye Germplasm Bank, Manaus, AM; six primer combinations generated 245 markers via PCR, which were scored in an ABI Prism 310 sequencer and analyzed with GeneScan Software; Jaccard similarities were estimated and a dendrogram was generated with UPGMA. Two groups of plants were observed in the dendrogram instead of three, and were similar at 0.795. Each group contained two subgroups, similar at 0.815. One group (n=41) contained 73% Pará landrace plants, with one subgroup (n=22) containing 91% Pará, and the other (n=19) containing 53% Pará. The other group (n=58) contained 53% Solimões and 40% Putumayo landrace plants, with one subgroup (n=21) containing 52% Solimões and 43% Putumayo, and the other (n=35) containing 57% Solimões and 37% Putumayo. The first group confirmed the Pará landrace. The second group suggested that the Solimões landrace does not exist, but that the Putumayo landrace extends along the Solimões River to Central Amazonia.
molecular markers; population differentiation; genetic resources; genetic analysis
