ASSESSMENT OF GENETIC VARIATION AMONG ACCESSIONS OF BACOPA MONNIERI USING ISSR MARKERS

Abstract

Bacopa monnieri is an important medicinal plant with high demand in pharmaceutical industries due to its numerous therapeutic properties. It is known by the name Brahmi and has been used as brain tonic in the Indian ayurvedic medicinal system to enhance memory development and concentration. A large number of Bacopa monnieri based commercial ayurvedic products are available in the market due to its therapeutic values and the raw material is taken mostly from the available natural wild resources. The quality of raw material of medicinal plants collected from wild populations is likely to be affected by genotype. Molecular markers are a powerful tool to verify the genetic consistency and to test whether in vitro regenerated plants are true-to-type. In the present study fifteen accessions of Bacopa monnieri belonging to different regions of India were analysed using ISSR molecular markers in order to derive the genetic relationships among them. With the 5 ISSR primers analysed, 25 distinct bands, lying in the size range of 200–2000 bp were observed of which 14 (56%) were polymorphic while rest 11 (44%) were monomorphic. Cluster analysis was performed on the basis of similarity co-efficient computed from ISSR marker data to create a dendrogram by using UPGMA method of the NTSYS-pc software.