Phylogenetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis Bentham

ABSTRACT

This study used randomly amplified polymorphic DNA markers to determine genetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis. Twenty accessions of the eleven Phlomis taxa were evaluated to determine genetic variability using fourteen ten mer primers selected from a 125 random oligonucleotide set. These 14 selected primers generated 85 RAPD bands that ranged in size from 200 to 1200 base pairs. Of the total bands, 88 percent (75) were polymorphic among the samples. Genetic distances among accessions were computed to produce a dendrogram based on UPGMA. Genetic distances ranged from 0.133 (between P. amanica and P. monocephala) to 0.494 (between P. chimerae and P. lunariifolia). The UPGMA tree based on distances has two major groups. The first comprised 9 taxa that were clustered into two subgroups. The first subgroup consisted of P. viscosa, P. lycia, P. amanica and P. monocephala while the second comprised P. lunariifolia, P. bourgaei, P. longifolia var. longifolia, P. grandiflora var. grandiflora and P. grandiflora var. fimbrilligera. The second group comprised 2 species, P. leucophracta and P. chimerae. Species-specific bands were observed for P. lycia, P. leucophracta, P. lunariifolia, P. bourgaei, P. chimerae and P. longifolia var longifolia.