Genetic diversity of five wild Actinidia arguta populations native to China as revealed by SSR markers

• Genetic diversity of wild A. arguta on such a big geographical scale has been first documented.
• A. arguta in central China showed high genetic diversity.
• Most of genetic variations of A. arguta are related with the origination within the populations.

Actinidia arguta is a species native to East Asia, and its genetic diversity is largely unknown. Here, the genetic diversity of five natural A. arguta populations distributed from northeast to southwest China was evaluated with 15 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. The observed heterozygosity and polymorphism information content of populations from Da-Ba Mountains and Mei County in the Qin-Ling Mountains were higher than those of populations from the Chang-Bai Mountains. Analysis of molecular variance revealed 16.62% SSR variation among and 83.38% variation within populations. An unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean clustering analysis showed clustering of the two populations from the Qin-Ling Mountains and clustering of the populations from the Da-Ba and Chang-Bai Mountains. Most wild A. arguta accessions were clustered according to the populations. These results imply that wild A. arguta resources in the Qin-Ling and Da-Ba Mountains represent a potential germplasm pool, which broadens the genetic basis of the kiwifruit germplasm for breeding.