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Genetic variation is believed to be a prerequisite for the short-and long-term survival of the plant species in their natural habitat. It depends on many environmental factors which determine the number of alleles on various loci in the genome. Therefore, it is important to understand the genetic composition and structure of the rare and endangered plant species from their natural habitat to develop successful management strategies for their conservation. However, rare and endangered plant species have low genetic diversity due to which their survival rate is decreasing in the wilds. The evaluation of genetic diversity of such species is very important for their conservation and gene manipulation. However, plant species can be conserved by in situ and in vitro methods and each has advantages and disadvantages. DNA banking can be considered as a means of complimentary method for the conservation of plant species by preserving their genomic DNA at low temperatures. Such approach of preservation of biological information provides opportunity for researchers to search novel genes and its products. Therefore, in this review we are describing some potential biotechnological approaches for the conservation and further manipulation of these rare and endangered plant species to enhance their yield and quality traits.

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Ziziphus spina-christi (sidr) is a shrub, sometimes a tree, native to a vast area of Africa stretching from Mauritania to West Africa. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it is an exotic medicinal plant for many diseases. The aim of this study was to assess the genetic diversity within and among 34 accessions of Z. spina-christi collected from different regions of Saudi Arabia. The amplification of genomic DNA with 11 inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) primers yielded 105 scorable loci, of which 93.4% were found to be polymorphic. The observed number of alleles (na), effective number of alleles (ne), Nei's gene diversity (h) and genetic diversity estimated by Shannon's information index (I) were 1.93, 1.44, 0.26 and 0.41, respectively. The total genetic diversity, H t (0.266 § 0.0289) was close to the average intrapopulation genetic diversity, H s (0.2199 § 0.0216). A high level of gene flow (N m D 2.37) between populations, reflecting high genetic differentiation (G st D 0.1739). The analysis of molecular variance showed that the maximum value of genetic variation was found within populations (90%), whereas a low value of genetic variance was observed among populations. The analysis using the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages clustered the population from Farasan Island as an out-group due to its geographical origin. The obtained results demonstrate that the ISSR markers may be used for evaluation of the genetic diversity due to their efficiency in revealing polymorphism even in closely related germplasm and may help in Ziziphus genome analysis.