It is necessary to characterize genetic diversity of the plant resources for their effective usage and protection. There are various well known marker systems to analyze and define the plant genomes. Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) is one of the efficiently used techniques for distinguishing the genetic variation among the wheat species as well as the other plants.

The objective of this study is to characterize the genetic diversity of 11 wild emmer (T. dicoccoides) and 8 emmer (T. dicoccon) populations each of which is found in Turkey. For this purpose wheat samples were analyzed with 25 RAPD markers of which 20 were found to be informative. Of the total 178 amplification products, 85 were polymorphic. An average percentage of polymorphism was detected as 47.75%. Dendrograms were constructed using an unweighted pair-group method with arithmetical averages (UPGMA). The UPGMA analysis revealed that the lowest similarity was between emmer wheat recorded as TUR 02456 and wild emmer wheat recorded as TUR 03399, whereas, the genetic distance between two emmer wheat which are recorded as TUR 03562 and TUR 03564 was the highest. Consequently, RAPD could clearly assessed the genetic diversity at inter and intraspecific levels and these species can be considered as valuable gene resources for future breeding and conservation programs.