This study was conducted to evaluate the genetic variation among accessions of Perilla crop and their weedy types collected from East and Southeast Asia using morphological characters and SSR markers.

1. To understand morphological differences among accessions of P. frutescens var. frutescens and P. frutescens var. crispa and their weedy types in East and Southeast Asia, I evaluated 10 morphological characteristics such as flowering time, seed size, seed hardness, seed color, color of surface leaf, color of reverse side leaf etc. As a result, morphological variation determined that cultivated var. frutescens and var. crispa show significant morphological differences in terms of seed size and seed hardness. Laos’s accessions show significant morphological differences in terms of flowering time. Furthermore, cultivated var. frutescens and var. crispa could be also clearly discriminated from each other using PCA (principal component analysis). Specifically, quantitative and qualitative characteristics such as seed size, seed hardness, seed color, color of surface leaf, color of reverse side leaf, leaf shape, flower color, stem color and degree of pubescence greatly contributed to differences seen in the positive and negative direction on the first axis. In this study, most accessions of cultivated var. frutescens and those of its weedy type could be clearly discriminated from one another. However, most accession of cultivated and weedy types of var. crispa was not clearly discriminated by PCA analyses.

2. SSR markers were employed to detect genetic diversity and genetic relationship among 95 accessions of Perilla crop and their weedy types by using 18 SSR primers. A total of 258 alleles, were identified at all the loci with an average of 7 per locus. Accessions of weedy types of var. frutescens and var. crispa showed more variable than those of cultivated types of var. frutescens and var. crispa. The accessions of Perilla crops from China showed higher SSR diversity than other countries. An UPGMA phylogenetic tree revealed three major groups with 27.8% genetic similarity. Group Ⅰ included 52 accessions of cultivate var. frutescens and 7 accessions of weedy var. crispa. GroupⅡincluded 1 and 8 accessions of cultivate and weedy var. frutescens, and 12 and 8 accessions of cultivate and weedy var. crispa, respectively. Group Ⅲ included 3 and 2 accessions of cultivate and weedy var. frutescens, and 1 accession of cultivate var. crispa , respectively. STRUCTURE analysis revealed three major groups at membership probability threshold 0.8. In this study, these results could expand our understanding of the genetic variation in Perilla crop from Korea and other countries, and also could be useful for Perilla crop germplasm preservation and collection in Korea.