RESUMO -Tendo em vista os resultados obtidos, cruzamentos entre os genótipos do primeiro e segundo grupo e destes com o genótipo Crioula Roxa, podem ser melhores por apresentarem maior divergência entre si. A técnica de RAPD mostrou-se eficaz na caracterização molecular dos genótipos de cebola, evidenciando que existe variabilidade entre os genótipos estudados.
Palavras-chave: Allium cepa L.. Melhoramento vegetal. Divergência genética.ABSTRACT -The genetic divergence has been measure between fifteen genotypes of onion grown in Santa Catarina using RAPD markers. Eleven primers from Operon Technologies series was used to produced 35 markers, these, 28 were polymorphic. The amplification products were visualized on 1.4% agarose gel stained with ethidium bromide. A similarity matrix using the Jaccard coefficient was constructed with the molecular data. A dendrogram was generated to better visualize the genetic similarity using a clustering method UPGMA. Three groups were formed using the similarity coefficient 0.6 as cutoff point. The first group met genotypes Super Superprecoce and Gauchinha. The second group met twelve genotypes. Into this group, the genotypes Bella Vista and Bella Dura were those with the greatest similarity coefficient, around 0.89. Bela Vista and Superprecoce, Catarina and the hybrid Bella Vista, with similarity coefficient of 0.88 between the pairs. The third group had only the genotype Crioula Roxa, which had the lowest value (0.31) for the similarity coefficient. Given these results, crosses between the genotypes of the first and second group and those with genotype Crioula Roxa can be better, because they have greater divergence between them. The RAPD technique proved effective in the molecular characterization of genotypes of onion, showing that there is variability among the genotypes.