Development of functional est-ssr and analysis of genetic diversity in centella asiatica

Abstract

Centella asiatica is a small trailing perennial herb and is the only species of Centella seen in India. Stem is green to greenish red colour and rooting at nodes. These connects plants each other. Petiole is long, smooth, green in colour. Leaves are palmately veined fleshy leaves. Plants are mainly found in marshy land of tropical and subtropical regions. Genetic diversity is that the total variety of genetic characteristics within the genetic makeup of a species. It plays a very important role within the survival and flexibility of a species and is important for a species to evolve. We aim to develop and use transcriptome based SSR molecular marker for analysis of genetic diversity in Centella asiatica in relation to the content of triterpenoids. To achieve that 129 Primers were designed from the transcriptome sequence obtained from NCBI. To validate the designed primers 15 primers were selected and used for genetic diversity analysis in 30 different Centella accessions collected from different regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The genetic diversity analysis result grouped the accessions in to six group based on the genetic distance. Single accessions was randomly selected from each group to chemical analysis the asiaticoside content and additionally two phenotypic characters were also characterised in all 30 collected accessions. The result of genetic diversity analysis shows the less Nei heterozygosity (0.0433) between the studied accessions and the positive correlation (0.142) with the asiaticoside content. From the analysed phenotypic characters, number of leaves per node character shows the interesting positive correlation (0.291) with asiaticoside content than genetic diversity. This study gives the positive and initiative step to the genetic diversity and the asiaticoside content correlations. This will be helpful to find out the functional marker related to asiaticoside content which will be useful in MAS studies in future.