Anchote (Coccinia abyssinica) is perennial trailing vine, underutilized but very importantrnendemic plant with high calcium content grown for its edible tuberous roots in Ethiopia.rnIn spite of its importance as food security crop, there is no information on molecularrngenetic diversity of this crop. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess geneticrndiversity within and among 12 populations of anchote using ISSR markers. A total of 87rnscorable bands were generated using nine ISSR primers among which 74 werernpolymorphic. Within population diversity based on polymorphic bands ranged fromrn13.8% to 43.53% with mean of 33.05%, Neiâ€™s genetic diversity of 0.04 to 0.156 withrnmean of 0.118, Shannon information index of 0.07 to 0.23 with mean of 0.175 andrnAMOVA within population 51.4%. With all diversity parameters, the highest diversityrnwas obtained from Gimbi, Bedele and Ale, whilst the lowest was from Manna. AMOVArnshowed 48.56% among populations variability and significantly lower than that of withinrnpopulation variation. Population differentiation with FST was 48.6%, impling highrndifferentiation among population. From Jaccardâ€™s pairwise similarity coefficient, Decharnand Nedjo were most related populations exhibiting 0.76 similarity and Manna andrnNedjo were the most distantly related populations with similarity of 0.52. The pentarnnucleotide primer 880 (GGAGA)3 showed unique band in some individuals thatrnappeared to be associated with morphological traits. Illubabor and Gimbi populationsrnexhibited highest genetic diversity so that the populations should be considered as thernprimary sites in designing conservation strategy and improvement of this crop.