ASSESSMENT OF THE POSSIBILITY OF USING THE CHLOROPLAST GENOME REGION psbA-trnH FOR THE STUDY OF GENETIC POLYMORPHISM OF UKRAINIAN POPULATIONS OF MUSCARI BOTRYOIDES (L.) MILL.

Abstract

The genus Muscari is represented in Ukraine by three species. One of them is M. botryoides, listed in the Red DataBook of Ukraine. M. botryoides is a morphologically polymorphic species that has been trying to be divided into several separate species for a long time. One of the arguments in favor of this division is the karyological differences between populations from different parts of the range. In particular, in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, dip-loid populations were found in contrast to the typical tetraploid ones for this species. However, molecular genetic studies are needed to confirm genetic polymorphism. In this work, we studied the possibility of using the chloroplast genome region psbA-trnH for DNA barcoding of Ukrainian populations of M. botryoides. We amplified and se-quenced the psbA-trnH for M. botryoides accessions from three different geographically distant Ukrainian popula-tions and compared them with the psbA-trnH sequences available in the GenBank database for M. botryoides acces-sions from Southwestern Europe and M. armeniacum. Twelve nucleotide substitutions at the beginning of the spacer were shown to be a result of a single evolutionary event, the inversion of the region corresponding to the stem-loop region in the 3΄ UTR of psbA mRNA. The unification of the position of this inversion leads to a significant change in the similarity index. In addition to this insertion, the analyzed psbA-trnH sequences also differ by one SNP and two indels of 1 bp and 7 bp in length. The inversion and the 7-bp indel are polymorphic at the intraspecific level in M. botryoides, which limits their phylogenetic use, but may be useful for microevolutionary analysis. Thus, all three ac-cessions of M. botryoides from three different regions of Western Ukraine differ in the combination of these charac-ters. These data allow us to talk about the genetic polymorphism of Ukrainian populations of M. botryoides.