GENETIC VARIABILITY OF LOCAL DURIAN (Durio zibethinus Murr.) IN TERNATE ISLAND BASED ON RAPD MARKERS

Ternate Island is one of the centers of durian production in North Maluku, Indonesia. The genetic variability of local durian varieties in Ternate Island has not been thoroughly studied so far. Although morphological variation has been reported, further analysis of their genetic variability is still needed. In the present study, the local Ternate durian polymorphism based on RAPD molecular markers was assessed to confirm previous information about their morphological variation and simultaneously evaluated their genetic variability. Twenty-seven variants of local durian were obtained from 15 villages in Ternate Island. The genomic DNAs of those variants were isolated and amplified using six selected RAPD primers. The resulted RAPD bands were analyzed with NTSYSpc 2.2 Software to know the variability among the variants. T4 and T2 variants had the closest relation among the 27 variant samples with similarity index value of 0.938. T12- T15 variants had the similarity index value (0.854) while T7 variant had close relations with variant T2 and T4 with similarity index value of 0.896. Furthermore, the farthest distants were observed between T1 and T15, T15 and T16, and T26 and T19 with similarity index value of 0.417.