ISSN (Online) : 2277-4572
Author(s): Greeshma Murukan and Murugan K*
Teak belongs to Verbenaceae show wide geographic distribution in South East Asia. The natural populations develop heritable phenotypic adaptations to local environmental factors in order to survive in different ecological conditions. Phenotypic variation was the result of interaction between genetic and environmental factors. In this juncture, present study aims to analyze morphometric and genetic polymorphism among the teak selected from six different localities of Kerala, India. Morphometric analysis resulted variations among the accessions. A dendrogram is constructed showed highland accessions in to a small clad whereas, midland and lowland accessions in to the larger cluster. Subsequently, RAPD is used for polymorphism detections and is possible for identifying large number of loci and ascribes unambiguous taxonomic and genetic relationships among different taxa. DNA was extracted from fresh young leaves from six regions belongs to high land, mid land and low land of Kerala, India. RAPD analysis were carried out with 20 decamer primers from Operon Technology. DNA was amplified using cycler gradient Eppendorf with 35 cycles. RAPD products were separated on 1.5 % agarose gel and detected by staining with ethidium bromide. There were 374 bands generated in 18 random primers. The number of monomorphic bands, polymorphic bands and the percentage of polymorphism were 21 bands, 353 bands and 94.38 % respectively. The high number and percentage of polymorphic bands revealed genomic DNA variation. This variation is in accordance with phenotypic variation detected in this experiment. Dendrogram clustered the clones into two major clades, the first clad further bifurcated into two having taxa from Munnar, Palakkad and Idukki. The second clad have taxa from Kochi, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram, India
