Molecular Variability in 45 Indian Taro Cultivars

Taro (Colocasia esculenta L. Schott), belonging to the family Araceae, is a popular tuber crop grown in India. Taro shows high variability in morphological characters with plants being mostly of green or purple type with a range of shades in between. To assess the genetic variability and diversity available in the germplasm available at CTCRI Trivandrum, 45 taro accessions which showed distinct morphology were evaluated for genetic diversity using 11 Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primers. Only three primers showed bands and they were used to analyse 45 taro accessions. These three primers are considered highly informative because they amplified one or more polymorphic bands that distinguished between accessions. The accessions studied showed high variability with regard to number of DNA bands. The similarity between different accessions was quantified using the software package NTSYS-pc (Numerical Taxonomy Multivariate Analysis System). Similarity between accessions varied from 60 to 100%. A dendrogram grouped the 45 accessions into 4 clusters and one outlier. Accessions collected from same geographical areas tended to cluster together. The data on genetic distance between accessions is useful for planning a hybridization programme while DNA fingerprinting can be used as an additional character to indicate the distinctiveness of a variety.