Molecular markers based genetic relatedness studies in tissue culture propagated Japanese plum cultivars Santa Rosa and Frontier
Abstract Santa Rosa and Frontier are the major Japanese plum cultivars grown throughout the world. The present investigation was performed to understand the genetic relatedness among in vitro propagated plum cultivars Santa Rosa and Frontier using PCR based molecular markers. For the study, three arbitrary markers viz. RAPD (Random amplified Polymorphic DNA), ISSR (Inter-Simple Sequence Repeats) and SCoT (Start Codon Targeted) were used. In RAPD analysis, 18 primers out of 28 amplified and generated 33 scorable bands. The allelic variations when analysed, revealed 84 percent similarity between these two cultivars with highest polymorphic information content of 0.78. Similarly, 15 ISSR primers produced 73 amplicons with an average of 4.86 amplicon per primer and similarity coefficient ranging from 62 to 67 percent. Seven SCoT primers out of 26 resulted in a total of twenty- six scorable bands with 24 polymorphic bands. Cluster analysis from all the three markers used broadly divided plum cultivars santa rosa and frontier into two major clusters containing in vitro shoots, their progenies and mother trees of respective genotypes. The study concluded that these three marker systems were found to be effective in revealing genetic relationship of these two commercially important plum cultivars.