Northwestern Argentina is the southernmost limit of the Andean domestication area of common bean hosting, like other areas in South America, wild relatives of beans, which are the main source of variability of beans. In addition, different cultivars developed at CIAT that are adapted to the environmental conditions of the country have been introduced and incidentally turn out to be important commercial cultivars.Argentina is a major producer and ranked third among countries exporting common beans. Therefore the genetic characterization of commercial cultivars and of wild relatives of common bean by molecular markers is particularly important to link markers to genetic traits of interest. Therefore the purpose of our work was to characterize and identify sources of bean diversity by means of molecular markers in commercial and wild cultivars.This work was supported by grants provided by the FONCYT-SECYT (08-12373), CICBA and Universidad Nacional de La Plata.Peer reviewed