| Summary: | <p>Cassava (<em>Manihot esculenta Crantz</em>), an important dietary staple in many countries, supplies food for one billion people in the world. Due to dietary importance, currently cassava cultivation is promoted in Sri Lanka. Even though there are different cassava cultivars grown, no studies have been conducted on cultivar discrimination and preference on their tubers for consumption. Therefore, the present study was conducted to study the morphological and genetic diversity, and assess the consumer preference of cassava cultivars grown in Sri Lanka. Morphological traits of leaves, stems and tubers, chlorophyll content, ascorbic acid content of leaves, dry matter content of leaves and tubers were recorded. The genetic diversity was assessed by sequencing and analyzing the ITS, a DNA barcoding locus. The leaf morphology of wild-accession and Landrace cultivars were considerably different from the rest. The stem morphology was highly different, mainly in the internodal length. A significantly high number of tubers were observed in the cultivar Suranimala. The significant associations were observed from color, aroma, texture, bitterness, hardness and overall taste vs. cassava cultivars. The nine cultivars were separated through ITS polymorphism. In phylogenetic analysis, wild-accession was the most genetically distant type having nine unique SNPs and one INDEL. Other cultivars were mainly divided into two clusters. Thus, it is possible to employ ITS barcoding marker to discriminate the cultivars of <em>M. esculenta</em>.</p>
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