ABSTRACT
Mulberry is the sole food source for mulberry silkworm and a number of indigenous and exotic varieties are used in sericulture. Studies on assessment of genetic diversity have been done amongst a few mulberry varieties using one or at the most two methods. However, no comprehensive study on a large number of varieties has been carried out. In present study, single primer amplification reaction (SPAR) methods have been used for determination of diversity in 27 mulberry varieties (exotic as well as indigenous), using four minisatellite core sequence primers for directed amplification of minisatellite DNA (DAMD), three simple sequence repeat (SSR) motifs as primers for inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) and 20 arbitrary sequence decamer primers for ran-dom amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) reactions. The Jaccard coefficients were determined for the DAMD, ISSR and RAPD band data (total of 58, 39 and 235 bands respectively). All three methods revealed wide range of distances supporting a wide range of mulberry genetic diversity. A cumulative analysis of the data generated by three methods resulted in a neighbour-joining (NJ) tree that gave a better reflection of the relatedness and affinities of the varieties to each other. Comparison of the three methods by marker indices and the Mantel test of correlation indicated that though all methods were useful for the assessment of diversity in mulberry, the DAMD method was better. When considered as two groups (10 exotic and 17 indigenous varieties), the mulberry varieties in the exotic group were found to have slightly greater diversity than the indigenous ones. These results support the concept of naturalization of mulberry varieties at locales distant from their origins.