## 4 Discussion
### Genetic Diversity of Chicory in the Kashmir Region
The AMOVA analysis found that most of the genetic diversity occurred within populations (56%) while genetic diversity between populations was 44%, indicating that chicory is a relatively outcrossing species. The high value of the intra-population genetic variation of chicory is in line with other studies on different plant species [83,84]. The present investigation also aimed to establish a relationship among the different accessions of chicory using ISSR markers collected from different sites of the Kashmir region. The PCoA plot was used to genetically differentiate the accessions collected from different agro-climatic zones into groups along the coordinate axes. The plot showed that the accessions collected from the Budgam, Ganderbal, and Pulwama districts were highly dispersed as compared to the accessions collected from other districts along the axes system. This may be due to the significant amount of genetic diversity exhibited by the accessions collected from such districts as also revealed by [PERSON]'s genetic diversity and [PERSON]'s information index. PCoA analysis reflects the importance of the largest contributor to the variation at each axis of differentiation [85]. On the other hand, the UPGMA hierarchical method produces a dendrogram with the maximum cophenetic correlation [86], and it is the most effective protocol for representing dissimilarities among accessions. Moreover, a dendrogram was prepared based on UPGMA using [PERSON]'s dissimilarity coefficients. In this dendrogram, 50 accessions were grouped into 7 major clusters and sub-clusters, i.e., cluster-I, cluster-II, cluster-III, cluster-IV, cluster-V, cluster-VI, and cluster-VII. However, cluster-VII formed a separate group and consisted exclusively of accessions from the Srinagar district. This may be due to the unique genetic architecture of the accessions found in this district. The distinctly different genetic architecture of these accessions can be ascribed to the kind of climate they inhabit. Our results are also in agreement with [PERSON] et al. [34], who observed that chicory has accumulated a large amount of genetic diversity controlled by several factors, including the outcrossing mechanism and climatic variations. Both the PCoA analysis and phylogeny reconstruction based on ISSR markers revealed a clustering pattern consistent with the geographical location and indicative of responses to environmental stress that resulted in such variations. ISSR markers are quite promising for differentiating closely related germplasm and thus may be used to effectively differentiate between accessions with a high degree of variability, thus making them powerful molecular tools for the analysis of significantly large genetic data [87, 88]. Previous reports have also revealed that the level of polymorphism detected in species depends on various parameters such as the type of germplasm [89], markers [90], selected primers [91], and sampling strategy [92]. In summary, the findings of this study show that ISSR markers are efficient in detecting polymorphism even in closely related germplasm and suggest that they are useful for genome analysis and genetic variability studies in chicory.