MOLECULAR ANALYSIS OF GENTIC DIVERSITY OF ENDOPHYTIC MYROTHECIUM SPP. BY RAPD AND ISSR MARKERS

India has immense variety of plants with endophytic organisms within them without any risk of life. In order to study genetic relatedness in ten isolates of Myrothecium species which is a fungus plant pathogen obtained as an endophyte from bark and twigs from Garcinia spp. were studied with RAPD and ISSR markers. The DNA markers are designed as a potential tool for mapping genetic divergence between individuals or within related species. Hence, in this research, we concentrate on applications, the advantages and limitations of RAPD, and ISSR molecular markers for genome fingerprinting of endophyte genotypes, to characterize genetic diversity and phylogenetic/evolutionary relationships between them. Five RAPD primers, OPM-01 to OPM-05 generated 193 polymorphic bands consisting of 72 markers. Three ISSR primers viz., ISSR-01, ISSR02 and ISSR-07 generated 93 polymorphic bands with a marker score of 41. The dendrogram produced using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic means (UPGMA) and cluster analysis made using Nei’s genetic distance resulted in the formation of isolates into four main groups and revealed a rather close phylogenetic relationship among some isolates whereas isolates M-2 and M-5 showed surprisingly large genetic variation and evolutionary divergence from other isolates.