VIJAY N. WAGHMARE AND UTTAMKUMAR S. BAGDE
Abstract
Bamboo belongs to the family Poaceae the monocotyledonous plants. Bamboos are an integral part of forestry and one of the major Non Timber Forest Products in the tropical and subtropical forests in Asia. Bamboo is regarded as the major resource that meets the need of common man and also a poverty alleviator due to its multipurpose uses. The Sindhudurg district, Maharashtra, India, is a good pocket of wild as well as cultivated bamboo. This district is rich in Bamboo flora specially four species viz. Bambusa bambos; Pseudoxytenanthera ritcheyi; Pseudoxytenanthera stocksii and Dendrocalamus strictus. To study the genetics of bamboo one has to face enormous difficulties simply because of rare flowering and we cannot make hybridizations as easily as like other angiosperms. For genetic characterization of bamboo the Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) method is used. This method of DNA profiling is proven excellent for identification, phylogenetic analysis, population studies and genetic linkage mapping of many plant species. Establishing multilocus markers RAPD analysis of genomes provides a versatile and rapid technology requiring low infrastructural input and use of arbitrary primers for developing plant DNA fingerprinting. In the present study, a comparative genetic analysis of four species of bamboo B. bambus, P. ritcheyi, P. stocksii and D. strictus Collected from Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, India had been carried out using PCR-RAPD analysis. The present results warrant an extensive survey of genetic variation between the given four species of bamboo. The results would be helpful in designing SCAR (sequence characterized amplified regions) marker for each species. These SCAR markers can be used as diagnostic marker to authenticate samples of given four species.