Morphological, Phytochemical and Molecular Characterization on Some Jatropha Species Cultivated in Egypt

Abstract

This study was to screen the morphological, phytochemical attributes and describe the similarity and diversity in terms of RAPD and ISSR profiles of four Jatropha species (J. multifida, J. gossypifolia, J. integrrima and J. curcas). As well, investigate genetic diversity among them for using in conserving at Gene-Banks and genetic improvement. It appeared that show the variation in twenty-three quantitative and qualitative attributes among Jatropha species under Egyptian condition. The results of Pearson correlation among twelve quantitative revealed high significant positive correlations. Negative correlation observed between petiole length and other traits except seed breadth, whereas it was -0.97 when be compared with pod length. In PCA studied, it noted that leaf length, leaf width and petiole length were contributing most to the separation among species. The result showed that all secondary metabolites analyzed were present in all leaves of Jatropha species studied but at different concentrations and it obtained confirm the relatedness of these species and spotlight these important phytochemicals in the species. At molecular study, four RAPD-primers displayed a total of 66 amplified fragments, in which 50 (75.76%) were polymorphic fragments. The number of total amplified fragments scored per primer ranged from 10 (primer OP-D09) to 24 (primer OP-Z03). Thirty-six out of 66 RAPD-PCR fragments were found to be useful as cultivar specific markers. In ISSR analysis, 5 of the ISSR primers generated variable banding patterns. A total of 63 out of 90 ISSR fragments were polymorphic. 36 amplified fragments were considered as cultivar-specific markers. Results of the combination of the banding patterns of both techniques, data exhibited that the most two closely related species were multifida and gossypifolia with the highest similarity index (1.00). On the other hand, the two most distantly related species were curcas and integerrima with no similarity index (0.00). The 9 primers of RAPD and ISSR yielded 113 polymorphic markers that unambiguously discriminated 4 genotypes into three clusters. In conclusion, polymorphisms of both could be used as efficient tools for the detection of similarities and phylogenetic relationships of the studied genotypes, which could be useful in the breeding programs.