Future warming and changes in the climate have dramatic effects on natural resources and biodiversity of the desert. Plants in the desert are frequently subjected to abiotic stress that affects adversely their growth and development as well as canopy level. Drought and heat stresses are among the factors which are generally expected to have significant effects on genetic diversity of natural plant populations. In this study, random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) technique was used to reveal the genetic diversity and assess differences among and between six Zilla spinosa (L.) populations grown in different habitats along Wadi Hagul during spring and summer seasons and to determine the geographical differences at the population level by examining molecular characteristics. Eight informative and reproducible primers were chosen for RAPD analysis. These random primers generated a total of 204 RAPD fragments including 199 polymorphic bands with 97.5% polymorphism. OPA-10, OPA-11, OPD-15, and OPC-03 primers gave very high ratios (100%) of polymorphic bands in PCR reactions. However, OPB-06, OPB-07, OPD-14 and OPC-01 displayed polymorphism between 92.6% and 96.9%. The lowest value of polymorphism (92.6%) was achieved by OPD-14 primer. The relationships between the genetic diversity indexes on one hand and the geographic and climatic factors on the other hand were estimated by the Pearson correlation with SPSS 11.0 software. The results of the correlation analysis show that there were significant (P
Key words: Zilla spinosa (L.), Environmental stress; Genetic diversity; Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)
|
