Assessment of Genetic Diversity among the Elite Rose (Rosa spp.) Accessions Using Rapd Markers

Aims: Owing to its export value in flower trade elsewhere in the world, Rose is the key commercial flower crop and the area under rose cultivation is ever increasing and the end-users always prefer new color variations. Hence, evolving new cultivars with novel color characteristics is the need of the hour, for which understanding genetic variation in the available cultivars is very much needed.

Study Design: This investigation was conducted to analyze the genetic diversity of 11 elite and commonly cultivated rose accessions in South India by using randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers.

Place and Duration of Study: Department of Floriculture and Landscape Architecture, Horticultural College and Research Institute, TNAU, Coimbatore.

Methodology: A total of 10 RAPD primers were employed, which was sufficient to distinguish the investigated rose cultivars.

Results: Among the 44 PCR products produced by these markers, 39 (88.64%) were found to be polymorphic bands. The number of amplified products per RAPD primer varied from 3 to 8 with a mean of 4.4 bands per primer. The Un weighted paired group of arithmetic means (UPGMA) dendrogram distinguished the rose accessions into two major clusters suggesting that the accessions were different from each other. The genetic similarity coefficients were determined with this RAPD data, and they were ranged from 0.59 to 0.89.

Conclusion: Molecular profiling data of this study have contributed to characterize and catalogue the rose germplasm data, which will be useful to identify the diverse rose lines for further breeding program that have the potential to improve the color variations.