Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia. Electronic address: alireza.valdiani@gmail.com
  • 2 Department of Cell & Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia; Medicinal Plant Research Center, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
  • 3 Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Tabriz, Iran; School of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia
  • 4 Department of Cell & Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia
  • 5 Department of Agriculture Technology, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia
  • 6 Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia; Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia; Institute of Bioscience, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE, Malaysia
Gene, 2014 Jun 1;542(2):156-67.
PMID: 24680780 DOI: 10.1016/j.gene.2014.03.039

Abstract

Andrographis paniculata Nees. (AP) is a self-pollinated medicinal herb with a wide range of pharmaceutical properties, facing a low diversity in Malaysia. Cross-pollination of AP accessions leads to considerable rates of heterosis in the agro-morphological characteristics and anticancer phytochemicals of this eminent medicinal herb. However, the poor crossability of the plant at the interpopulation or intraspecific levels is an obstacle from the evolutionary and breeding points of view as an average of 4.56% crossability was recorded for AP in this study. Hence, this research aimed to elicit the impact of parental genetic distances (GDs) on the rate of crossability of AP using seven accessions in 21 possible cross combinations. To this end, a set of 55 randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primers and a total of 13 agro-morphological markers were employed to test the hypothesis. Twenty-two out of the 55 RAPD primers amplified a total of 257 bands of which 107 bands were found to be polymorphic. The principal component analysis (PCA) based on the RAPD markers revealed that the studied AP accessions were distributed to three distinct groups. Furthermore, it was noticed that even a minor increase in GD between two parents can cause a decline in their crossability. Unlike, the morphological-based GDs acted neutrally to crossability. This finding suggests that, despite the low genetic diversity among the Malaysian APs, a population prescreening using RAPD markers would be useful to enhance the rate of fruit set through selecting the genetically adjacent parents.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.