Sunn pest is one of the most destructive insects in the western and central parts of Asia causing severe reductions of wheat yield and flour quality. Therefore, an effort was un-dertaken to find effective resistance by analyzing genetic variation among 25 wheat geno-types artificially infested in field-cages as well as using start codon targeted (SCoT) poly-morphism and inter- retrotransposon amplified polymorphism (IRAP) markers. High vari-ation was revealed amongst genotypes with Sunn pest resistance characteristics including Bayat, Bezostaya, Sayson, Line93, Line120, Rasha-Gol, Gol-Sepi and Aaras-Golsoor, which were classified as resistant to moderately resistant. SCoTs and IRAPs were deter-mined as efficient markers for studying genetic diversity. The non-parametric Kruskal- Wallis test was conducted to evaluate the effect of specific SCoT and IRAP bands on Sunn pest resistance characteristics for wheat genotypes. The stepwise regression analysis exhibited seven informative SCoTs and IRAPs explaining the highest resistance character-istics variation ranging from 25.7-50.1 and 17.6- 40.1, respectively. The relationship be-tween resistance of genotypes and informative SCoT and IRAP bands was found based on canonical discriminant analysis showing the capacity of informative markers for function-al marker selection method and screening the wheat germplasms for Sunn pest resistance characteristics.
