ANALYSIS OF SOMACLONAL VARIATION IN TISSUE CULTURED BANANA PLANTS (MUSA AAA CV. €˜GRAND NAIN’)

Molecular Analysis of Micropropagated Banana Variants (Musa spp. ‘AAA’) Using RAPD Markers

“…The primers OPA-19 and OPC-03 produced monomorphic fragments (Table 2; Figure not shown) and rest of the selected primers showed polymorphic amplification pattern indicating the existence of genetic difference in morphological variants compared to normal Robusta plant collected from orchard (Table 2; Figure 2). There were only two primers from previous studies (Damasco et al, 1996;Anitha et al, 1998;Walther et al, 1997;Martin et al, 1998;Martine et al, 2006;Vidya and Nair, 2002;Dougdoug et al, 2007) viz., OPA-2 and OPC-1, were useful in differentiating morphological variants and normal Robusta plant from orchard, while rest of them generated monomorphic amplification patterns. In previous studies, primers have been selected on variants of cultivar Grand Naine, Red and Williams and hence, it might be possible that all of them could not differentiate genetic variations in off types of Robusta cultivar.…”

“…Presently, DNA based molecular markers like RAPD (Williams et al, 1990) are highly suitable, because of their simplicity, fast assay based on PCR, less cumbersome and it can analyze variations at many loci in minute quantities of DNA, even in closely related organisms such as near isogenic lines (NILs). The RAPD markers have been successfully employed in fingerprinting somaclonal variants (Damasco et al, 1996;Anitha et al, 1998;Walther et al, 1997;Martin et al, 1998;Martine et al, 2006;Vidya and Nair, 2002;Dougdoug et al, 2007) as well as assessment of genetic stability in long-term micropropagated bananas (Venkatachalam et al, 2007). In the present study, therefore, a survey was carried out to identify the morphological variants in orchards growing with micropropagated Robusta banana plants and also an effort has been made to characterize them using RAPD markers.…”