Abstract
Tobacco (Nicotina tabacum) has been introduced to Thailand for hundreds of years. All tobaccos cultivated in the country are legally separated to local (or early-imported) and imported cultivar groups. However, no method could precisely differentiate the two groups, especially from cured leaf samples. Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) analysis was introduced to estimate genetic polymorphism of 19 tobacco cultivars grown in Thailand. Thirty-two selective primer-combinations were screened on the genomic DNA extracted from cured leaves. Three primer pairs were selected and resulted in 139 scorable AFLP fragments, of which 103 (74.1%) were polymorphic. Genetic relationship analysis revealed clustering patterns of tobacco samples generally following the cultivar groups. Almost all local cultivars were found closely related to Burley and Turkish types of the imported group, but significantly separated from Virginia type. Our finding therefore should be an important knowledge for further research on cultivar identification and genetic improvement of tobaccos.
Highlights
IntroductionTobacco is a perennial plant in the genus Nicotiana of the family Solanaceae
1.1 Local and imported tobacco-groupsTobacco is a perennial plant in the genus Nicotiana of the family Solanaceae
Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) technique was introduced in this study and we successfully developed AFLP markers suitable to determine genetic differences between local and imported tobacco cultivar groups
Summary
Tobacco is a perennial plant in the genus Nicotiana of the family Solanaceae. The genus Nicotiana contains about 64 different species of herbs and shrubs (Goodspeed, 1954). Almost all of the tobaccos cultivated worldwide belong to the species N. tabacum L and its leaves are commercially processed as an ingredient of cigarettes and cigars. Nicotiana tabacum is a natural amphidiploid (2n= 48) derived from hybridisation between N. sylvestris and N. tomentosiforimis wild progenitor species (Gerstel, 1960 and Gerstel, 1963). Tobacco originated in the tropical Americas and it can be found cultivated in almost all subtropical and temperate regions of the world from about 60o North to 45o South (Akehurst, 1981). Tobacco has been one of major economic forces in almost one hundred countries around the world (Ren & Timko, 2001). It is known to be the most widely-grown non-food crop in the world
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