Development of male-specific SCAR marker in Garcinia morella (Gaertn.) Desr.

Abstract

Garcinia morella (Gaertn.) Desr. (family Clusiaceae) is popularly known as ‘Indian gamboge’ is a fruit yielding tree of tropical rain forests of Western Ghats of India (Anonymous 1956). It also occurs in Sri Lanka and Indo-China Himalayan regions. It is a multipurpose tree grown as a plantation crop along with Garcinia indica (Kokum) and Garcinia cambogia (Malabar tamarind). The fruit rinds are used as a condiment and for garnish. Bioactive compounds such as moreollin (Subba Rao et al. 1978), gambogic acid (Tang et al. 2011) have been isolated from the fruits and the bark, respectively, and evaluated for their antibiotic and anticancer properties. The trees are dioecious and the distinction between male and female trees can be made only at the flowering stage, after 10–12 years. It is cultivated as a plantation crop and the sex determination in this plant at an early juvenile stage will be useful for planning the male and female tree ratio in the orchards and it also enables the tree improvement programme. Recently, molecular tools were employed in dioecious taxa for early identification of sex and understanding the developmental and the evolutionary pathways of sexual dimorphism. Specific molecular markers can be deduced from unique, single-copy segments of the genome and can be considered codominant and can be used in sex determination. Sequence characterized markers (SCAR) which are based on randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis are locus-specific, more reliable and more reproducible for molecular identification (Paran and Michelmore 1993). SCAR marker linked to sex-specific genes have beensuccessfully used in sex identification of many dioecious plants including Carica papaya (Bedoya and Nunez 2007), Phoenix dactylifera (Dhawan et al. 2013). In this