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Pak. J. Bot., 42(1): 97-109, 2010.

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MORPHOMETRIC AND GENETIC VARIATION IN PUERARIA MIRIFICA CULTIVARS ACROSS THAILAND

TRIN SUWANVIJITR¹, JIRATTIKARN KAEWMUANGMOON¹, WICHAI CHERDSHEWASART² AND CHANPEN CHANCHAO²*

Abstract: Pueraria mirifica is a leguminous herbal plant whose tuberous roots are used in estrogen replacement. Leaves were collected for 39 locations across Thailand with seed pods and flowers also collected when available from a subset of 14 and 11 of these locations respectively. Morphometric analysis revealed a low level of variation between cultivars. Linear regression analysis suggested that leaves trended to decrease in size from the West to the East whilst pods trended to increase in size from the South to the North and also the West to the East. Genetic analysis was conducted by direct sequencing of one nuclear (rDNA ITS region) and one chloroplast (trnLF) region, and also by random genome analysis by RAPD-PCR using five primers. All chloroplast sequences obtained revealed a low level of variation between isolates although the rDNA ITS sequences displayed a divergence of up to 25.2 %. All of 93 bands generated by the five RAPD primers were polymorphic. The average genetic distance varied from 0 to 42. NJ based phylogenies derived from ITS and RAPD data revealed poor resolution. In summary, both analyses indicate low variation amongst cultivars.

¹Program of Biotechnology and ²Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330 Thailand,

*Corresponding address: chanpen@sc.chula.ac.th