Phylogenetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis Bentham

Abstract

This study used randomly amplified polymorphic DNA markers to determine genetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis . Twenty accessions of the eleven Phlomis taxa were evaluated to determine genetic variability using fourteen ten mer primers selected from a 125 random oligonucleotide set. These 14 selected primers generated 85 RAPD bands that ranged in size from 200 to 1200 base pairs. Of the total bands, 88% (75) were polymorphic among the samples. Genetic distances among accessions were computed to produce a dendrogram based on UPGMA. Genetic distances ranged from 0.133 (between P. amanica and P. monocephala ) to 0.494 (between P. chimerae and P. lunariifolia ). The UPGMA tree based on distances has two major groups. The first comprised 9 taxa that were clustered into two subgroups. The first subgroup consisted of P. viscosa , P. lycia , P. amanica and P. monocephala while the second comprised P. lunariifolia , P. bourgaei , P. longifolia var. longifolia , P. grandiflora var. grandiflora and P. grandiflora var. fimbrilligera . The second group comprised 2 species, P. leucophracta and P. chimerae . Species-specific bands were observed for P. lycia , P. leucophracta , P. lunariifolia , P. bourgaei , P. chimerae and P. longifolia var longifolia .