ISSR ANALYSIS OF SOMACLONAL VARIATION IN CALLUS-DERIVED PLANTS OF AMORPHOPHALLUS RIVIERI DURIEU

This communication reports detection of somaclonal variation among tissue culture-raised plants of Amorphophallus rivieri Durieu, an economically important crop in China, with high content of glucomannan in its corms. A population of regenerated plants was obtained from a single donor plant of A. rivieri via corm organogenesis, and 28 plants were randomly selected as a representative sample and subjected to analysis of somaclonal variation using inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers. Of the 26 ISSR primers screened, 13 gave distinct and reproducible band patterns, yielding 131 bands with an average of 10.1 bands per primer. Ten primers were polymorphic and generated 16 polymorphic bands with 12.2% mean polymorphism. Based on the ISSR data from the regenerated plants and the donor plant, Jaccard's similarity coefficients were calculated; they ranged from 0.961 to 1.000 with a mean of 0.982. A dendrogram was constructed using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA); it showed that a majority of regenerated plants (including the donor plant) clustered closely, with a mean similarity coefficient of 0.987. Low somaclonal variation observed in the regenerated plants indicates that rapid propagation of A. rivieri via corm organogenesis is a practicable method with a low risk of genetic instability.