Cultivars of perennial grass species are usually synthetics with a limited number of constituent parental clones, prone to inbreeding depression. Plant breeders aim at a balance between intensity of selection and maintenance of genetic diversity when making their choice of parent clones in an intuitive way, aided by fragmentary pedigree information. Molecular markers offer new opportunities for assessing genetic diversity among selected plants. The objective of the investigation presented here is to check if the genetic distance as measured by AFLP polymorphisms reflects consanguinity among Festuca pratensis individuals from our breeding programme
