Genetic Diversity Analysis in Casuarina and Allocasuarina Species Using ISSR Markers

Abstract

One hundred twenty individual samples belonging to three Casuarina (C. junghuhniana C. glauca and C. equisetifolia) and two Allocasuarina species (A. huegeliana and A. littoralis) grown in a species trial garden at Panampally Research Station, Kerala, India were studied for genetic diversity estimation. Seven ISSR primers targeting 2 or 3 nucleotide repeats anchored at 3’ or 5’ end were used and 241 polymorphic amplicons were scored. The size of the amplification products ranged from 220-1710 bp. Among the genera studied, percent polymorphism were 40.6% and 23.1% in Casuarina and Allocasuarina respectively. At species level, the highest percent polymorphic loci was observed in C. equisetifolia (18.6%) while the lowest was registered in A. littoralis (4.8%). Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) showed that a large proportion of genetic variation (92.36%) resided among species, while only 8.64 per cent resided among individuals within species. The estimation of genetic diversity will be an important tool in Casuarina hybridization program.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.100437

Pages

32 - 39

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords