In the present study, flow-cytometric analysis of ploidy level were coupled with the genotyping platform based on SSR markers and analyzed 630 accessions of the genus Musa held at the ITC collection including 49 Reference DNA collection samples (http://www.musanet.org/Musagenotypingcentre/genomicDNA), as well as 27 samples received from Hawaii to enlarge the representation of individual Musa subgroups, and 38 samples collected during the Bioversity International expedition to Indonesia (Sutanto et al. 2016). Altogether, 695 accessions were genotyped, including 327 diploids, 363 triploids and 5 tetraploids.

The extent of genetic diversity among all samples was evaluated using the Nei´s genetic distance coefficient calculation (Nei 1973) and subsequent cluster analysis was done using the Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA; Michener and Sokal 1957). To enable joint analysis of all ploidy levels (2×, 3× and 4×) the genotypic data was converted into binary (coded by 1/0 = presence/absence) and analyzed as a dominant marker’s record (Weising et al. 2005). Dendrograms were constructed based on the results of UPGMA analysis and visualized in FigTree v1.4.0. The dissimilarity index threshold of 0.25 was used to assess the grouping of the accessions on the dendrogram. Bootstrap support for individual branches was calculated on 1000 replicates and values above 35% (0.35) were used to confirm the fundamental subclustering pattern.