DIVERSITY ANALYSIS AMONG WITHANIA SOMNIFERA GENOTYPES USING RAPD AND ISSR MARKERS

摘要

Withania somnifera is a multipurpose plant of immense therapeutic value and wide geographic distribution and exhibits extensive phenotypic and chemical variability. Characterization of plants using molecular markers is an ideal approach for improvement and conservation of plant genetic resources. Random amplified polymorphic DMA (RAPD) and inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) molecular fingerprinting markers were employed as genetic markers for the assay of the genetic relationship of sixteen accessions of Withania somnifera collected from different locations of India. Randomly selected25 decamerprimers amplified204 RAPD marker Loci out of which 152 bands (74.5%) were polymorphic. Twenty eight ISSR primers were used to generate fingerprints and a total of 186 alleles were amplified, among them 151 were polymorphic (81.1%). ISSR markers were found to be more informative as compared to the RAPDs markers. Several ISSR markers amplified genotype specific alleles and can be used for authentication and detection of adulteration in plant material. Similarity matrices were generated from RAPD and ISSR marker data separately using Jaccard's coefficient and dendrograms were constructed based on UPGMA clustering. Genotypes were clustered into two groups and the grouping exhibited similar structurefor both the marker systems.