A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY ON GENETIC DIVERSITY AMONG ECONOMICALLY IMPORTANT MEDICINAL PLANT B.MONNIERI USING RAPD-PCR TECHNIQUE

Abstract

Acknowledging the importance, increase in demand and exploitation of medicinal plants, a genuine endevour has been made in this report to examine genetic diversity among 15 accessions of economically important medicinal plant Bacopa monnieri using RAPD-PCR technique. Genomic DNA was isolated using the CTAB method with slight modifications. The amplification of isolated genomic DNA was accomplished by using 10 random oligonucleotide primers and an appropriate PCR program. Clear and unique bands were obtained implies that RAPD is an easy and reliable tool for plant genome analysis. Out of 10 RAPD primers, 8 primers proved to be reproducible. During the procedure of RAPD-PCR profiling, the amplification of genomic DNA of the 15 Brahmi (B.monnieri) samples of varied geographical origin was established by 8 primers generating 35 bands, of which 23 were polymorphic with 65.75% polymorphism. A dendogram was constructed and utilized using the UPGMA algorithm with the aid of NTSYS-pc software (SAHN module). Cluster analysis of RAPD data placed 15 Brahmi accessions into two main groups. The analysis grouped all the accessions having different geographical origins into different clusters. The results indicated that RAPD marker system can be efficiently utilized in determination of genetic variability among Brahmi accessions having different geographical origins. It can be concluded that this study prove to be useful for plant breeders in selecting wild type parents of B.monnieri in breeding programmes in the future, in designing sampling strategies for in situ and ex situ conservation of this commercially significant medicinal plant and also in authentication of this economically important medicinal plant for quality assurance of herbal material which is an essential prerequisite to ensure safety of herbal medicines obtained from Brahmi for human consumption. To our best of knowledge only few reports till date are assessible on the utility of RAPD markers for B.monnieri (Darokar et al., 2001; Tripathi et al., 2012; Karthikeyan et al., 2011).