Assessment of Genetic Diversity of Haberlea Rhodopensis Friv. by ITS1 Markers

ABSTRACT

Haberlea rhodopensis Friv. is a Balkan endemic plant and a tertiary relic with highly fragmented habitat. Its populations are isolated and often inhabit different environmental conditions. We found significant variations in many morphology and phenology traits between and even within H. rhodopensis populations. It is interesting from evolutionary, genomic and ecological point of view to asses whether the variations can be attributed only to the plant adaptability or it could be attributed also to differences on genetic level. This initial study included three geographically isolated populations from Rhodopi and Stara Planina mountains. We asses at DNA level the polymorphism between these populations by internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) sequences. As a donor of plant material we used plants from the in vitro gene bank for Gesneriaceae family established at the Dept. of Plant physiology and Molecular biology.

Initial results from our analyses showed that the population of H. rhodopensis for the region of Chervenata stena possess two single nucleotide substitutions (transistions from thymine to cytosine) at relative positions 37 and 94. The other two populations showed high similarity of ITS1 sequences regardless of the geographic isolation. The obtained results demonstrated that the ITS1 regions is suitable as molecular marker for studying genetic polymorphism between H. rhodopensis populations but it should be combined with other marker genes that are represented in a single copy in the plant genome as suggested by (3). Our initial results indicate that we could expect unusual patterns of polymorphisms distribution between Haberlea rhodopensis populations.

Keywords:

• Haberlea rhodopensis Friv.
• population polymorphism
• molecular markers
• ITS