ABSTRACT
Dimocarpus longan Lour. is an edible and traditional herb in China, commonly referred to as longon. An improved randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) protocol was here developed in order to determine the geographical origins of D. longan samples collected from 5 provinces in the southern and southwestern areas of China, including Sichuan, Hainan, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi. Generally, the improved RAPD method generated good fingerprinting of the 5 samples using the selected 17 primers. In particular, primers SBS-A5, SBS-A13, SBS-I9, SBS-I20, SBS-M1, and SBS-Q12 produced distinguishable bands that clearly separated all 5 cultivars, suggesting that there are variations in RAPD genetic sites among the samples. The similarity index ranged from 0.69 to 0.76. The Sichuan and Hainan clades clustered together with a 0.73 similarity index. The Guangxi and Fujian clades clustered together with a 0.76 similarity index, and they formed the sister clade to the Sichuan/Hainan clade with a 0.71 similarity index. The Guangdong clade was in a basal polytomy with a 0.70 similarity index. Based on the abundant DNA polymorphisms, these longan accessions are distinguishable using our improved RAPD technique. Therefore, RAPD analysis is an effective technique in distinguishing the geographical origins of D. longan. Moreover, the improved method could also be employed for a variety of applications including genetic diversity and fingerprinting analyses.