Garlic (Allium sativum .L) has been clonally propagated for thousands of years because it does not produce seed under standard cultivation conditions. A single garlic accession frequently displays a high degree of phenotypic plasticity that is likely to be dependent on soil type, moisture, geographical locations and cultural practice. This can induce genetic diversity among same genetically cultivars or clones and cause different nomenclature for them. Studies which have assessed garlic diversity with Isozyme and Random Amplified Polymorphism DNA (RAPD) markers generally agreed with the morphological observations but sometimes failed to discriminate clones, so the researchers tried to use DNA fingerprinting method for studying genetic diversity. Because of high accuracy and reproducibility, AFLP technique has used frequently for this purposes. In recent research to discriminate among closely related Iranian garlic clones Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) were used. Thirty-seven garlic clones collected from the main cultivation areas of Iran were analyzed. Five primer combinations of EcoRI+3 and MseI+3, showed 330 unambiguous bands Which 233 markers (70/6%) were polymorphic Dendrogram based on clusters analysis classified Iranian garlic clones in 6 main groups .There was relatively high similarities within (58-100%) even though some of clones showed very high similarity (more than 95%). Eight clone of 1st and eight clone of 5th group had no polymorphic bands in their group and likely can be duplicate clones. In general we detected high relationship between genetic diversity and geographical distributions. Recent research shows that AFLP technique not only can differentiate species, but also can classify botanical varieties and well-defined ecotype groups. AFLP fingerprinting technique can decrease costs of conservation plant material by discrimination of duplicate accessions in germplasm collections especially in case of garlic that has been propagated as
