Assessment of genetic diversity of some wild populations of Thymus kotschyanus using RAPD molecular markers

Abstract

RAPD molecular markers were used to assess the genetic diversity of some population of thyme (Thymus kotschyanus) from Iran. The 17 tennucleotide primers used that produced 185 high-resolution bands, which 21 of these were monomorphic and 162 were polymorphic. An average, 10.88 bands were obtained per primer and 9.52 of these were polymorphic. POPGENE software was used to calculate Nei's genetic distance among populations and based on the cluster analysis of this matrix, a UPGMA dendrogram was drawn using the software NTSYS-pc. On the basis of dendrogram among populations of wild mountain thyme, Avan (Qazvin) and Siahkal (Gilan province) populations was the most similar between studied populations with the distance of 0.094 high disimilarity was observed between Qazvin and Mazandaran 2 populations with the distance of 0.185 within populations variation based on Shannon's information index and Nei genetic diversity index showed that Takestan (I= 0.26; H= 0.3) and Alamut (I= 0.24; H= 0.15) had a highest and lowest within populations variation compared to other populations, respectively. Average of Fst and Nm indices, which represent the amount of gene flow between populations, were recorded as 0.26 and 1.361, respectively, which reflects the high level of gene exchange between ten populations of Thymus kotschyanus.