Abstract

Wild almond relatives are valuable reservoirs of allelic variation for crop improvement and conservation, yet Kazakhstan’s wild-almond genetic resources remain poorly characterised. We conducted an exploratory SSR assessment of 80 putative individuals from four taxon-locality groups (20 per group), each representing one sampled population: Prunus ledebouriana, P. tenella, P. petunnikowii, and P. spinosissima. Of 22 nuclear simple sequence repeat loci screened for cross-taxon transferability, 15 generated reproducible profiles and were retained; their even genome-wide distribution was not verified. Across the full dataset, the mean number of alleles was 3.55, the effective number of alleles was 2.62, expected heterozygosity (He) was 0.544, and 95.0% of loci were polymorphic. Missing genotypes ranged from 0.0% to 34.7% among groups, and six loci had at least 20% missing data. AMOVA attributed 76.5% of variation to within-group differences and 23.5% to among-group differences (PhiPT = 0.235, p = 0.001). PCoA, unbiased Nei distances, UPGMA, and descriptive Bayesian clustering separated the four sampled groups. A nine-locus sensitivity analysis that excluded the six high-missing loci retained P. spinosissima as the group with the highest mean He (0.699), whereas P. petunnikowii increased from 0.471 to 0.609. Thus, the low full-panel estimate for P. petunnikowii was not robust to missing data. Because taxon identity was fully confounded with locality and the marker panel was limited, the results are interpreted as a regional marker-transferability and methodological baseline rather than as species-wide or genome-wide inference.

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